Jordan

A room full of fat cops sitting around smoking brought back childhood memories of Indonesia. I was in no man’s land at the border post between Israel and Jordan, and had ducked in here to ask how much a taxi to Petra should cost. I would have assumed that they get asked thirty times per day, but the question provoked an animated discussion in Arabic. Fingers pierced the dingy air, cigarettes were wielded and excessively long moustaches faced off like warring sea lions. Each shouted the occasional word in English, and consensus seemed to waver around 50 dinars (75 dollars), but they were still at it as I quietly let myself out and walked across the border into Jordan.



Sand Bottles

I decided to spend a few days in an Arabic country while I’m in the Middle East, and as tourists keep getting kidnapped in Egypt, and Syria is in the midst of civil war, it seemed like Jordan would be a more relaxing choice.



Urn Tomb

A man detached himself from the group of smoking taxi drivers waiting at the border and approached, planting himself half way between them and me, pushed out his chest and flipped the official laminated card hanging from his neck to the side written in English. He decreed that the cost of a taxi to Petra was 70 dinars, but was easily bargained back to 50 when I told him that’s what the police had said. He was adamant that there was no way of sharing a taxi, so I agreed with him and sat down to wait for someone else to come across the border with whom I could share a taxi.



Asteroid

One of the taxi drivers ambled over and whispered to me secretively that there was no way of sharing a taxi, that’s how the system here works. I asked him about his excellent English, and he proudly drew out a United Nations identity card from his wallet. Khalid had worked for the Jordanian army as a communications officer in peace keeping armies sent to Ethiopia, the Gaza strip, Iraq and several other places. After a few minutes of reminiscing and advising me on the best high frequency radios for desert conditions he remembered himself and went back to the topic of the impossibility of sharing a taxi. A group of Panamanians were being accosted by the Taxi Emperor who I’d first spoken to, and I called over to them in Spanish that the police had said the trip cost 50 dinars. The Emperor was furiously polite in his request that I please do not speak to the other people crossing the border. I guided Khalid back onto the topic of radios and peace keeping missions, but before long another taxi driver came over and said something in Arabic. After rebuffing him a couple of times Khalid yelled at him sharply and he retreated.



Camel Tenor

Now a middle aged European lady was being bundled into a taxi by the Emperor. I asked where she was going but it was in the wrong direction, and the Emperor closed the door behind her then insisted with barely withheld rage that I please do not speak to the other people crossing the border.



Ancient Texts

Khalid had gone back to the huddle of drivers and returned shortly with an offer of 30 dinars. It was from the interloper who he’d yelled at a couple of minutes previously. The Emperor waddled over hurriedly to do the negotiations, calculating 30 dinars as being 200 Israeli shekels. I did a quick calculation of my own (more like 150 shekels), and after some back and forth it was agreed that I would be driven first to an ATM where I could take out 30 dinars with my card.



Dusk over modern Petra

I spent a couple of days in Petra, an ancient city that is important in archaeological circles because it’s where they filmed Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. I can say without hesitation that it’s the most impressive place I’ve ever visited. Each empire that passed through the area cut its own magnificent tombs, palaces and theatres into the sunset red rock, and built and rebuilt cities that collapsed in earthquakes that shook them back into the sand from which they rose.



Monastery

Jordan is the land in which friendliness exceeds your desires. After the early start and a day of climbing around Petra I was tired and just wanted to eat and sleep. I walked out of the hotel to look for a quiet place to eat and lose myself in thoughts. One of the family who owns the hotel ran out after me and insisted on giving me a lift in to town. He chatted amiably and I did my best to respond politely until he dropped me off at his favourite restaurant. At the door the owner greeted me and asked where I was from and about my stay in Jordan. He showed me to a table, and I asked for the first thing on the menu, then closed my eyes sleepily. A couple of guys sitting at the next table called over to me, welcoming me to Jordan and asking about my stay here. I talked with them for several minutes, until thankfully they got up and left with best wishes and parting smiles. When I went to pay, the owner insisted on charging me half price, and his friend welcomed me and asked me about my stay in Jordan. When I got back to the hotel I waited till the receptionist had disappeared out the back to check on something and snuck past to get to my room. I got into the shower but was unable to completely relax, convinced a smiling, turbaned head was going to pop through the window and ask how my stay was going.



Taxi Drivers

I’m now in Amman where I’ll be for a couple of days, and then I’m going to head back to Israel.

Settlers

I've met Palestinians, peace activists, orthodox Jews and people from the UN. The remaining group that I wanted to talk to was the Jewish settler movement. It was quite tricky to set up a meeting, and involved a couple of cancellations, but I was determined to talk to the people at the forefront of the conflict, and yesterday I was finally able to do so. My guide for the day was Bruce Brill, a journalist and former US intelligence operative who moved to Israel in the 70s, and helped found one of the settlements here.



Bruce

From Jerusalem we took the Hebron road, turning off after 20 minutes or so to pass through a checkpoint, then down some winding roads that turned to gravel tracks, and eventually we rumbled to a stop outside the house of Drori, a settler who founded an "outpost". To get around political requirements imposed by the US government to prevent Israel from building more settlements in the West Bank, Israel instead builds "outposts" with little infrastructure, which are later converted into full blown settlements. While the government publically condemns such construction, Drori told us proudly that not long ago he had 12 members of the Knesset (Israeli Parliament) standing on his porch congratulating his efforts, and that recently he successfully sued the government for 20,000 shekels, because they had privately told him to build the settlement and then later publically deemed it illegal. I asked him what the purpose of building the settlements was, and he stated unequivocally that the aim of building the settlements was to prevent the creation of a Palestinian State. I asked why and he replied that if the Palestinians are allowed to build a state, they will destroy Israel and the Jewish people. He pointed out that the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was formed before the first settlements were ever built, and was committed to the destruction of Israel (the PLO later renounced this position).



Haifa Gardens

I was only able to ask those two questions in the hour that we spoke, because the rest of the time I couldn't get a word in edgeways, as I was lectured about human rights violations committed by other countries in the region, and his views on the history of the conflict. This happens a lot in Israel, partly because some ignorant foreigners make aggressive statements without knowing what they're talking about, so the working assumption of many right wingers is that anyone who disagrees with them is ignorant of the region's history. In my experience the other reason that someone will talk constantly in a political discussion is because they are afraid that they are wrong, and want to minimize the chances of that becoming evident. In contrast, if a person's position is correct, he or she should have no fear of being asked questions about it. As we left I thanked Drori for talking to us, but suggested to him gently that the next time someone comes to ask him about politics he should talk about his own situation instead of everyone else's, and he smiled sheepishly and nodded. Even so, he did make a couple of good points, one being that European media tend to characterize settlers as "lunatics with M-16s who eat Palestinian children for breakfast", as he put it. Another point was that there was little security around the settlement, something I had noticed driving up to it. The implication is that the local Arab population is not upset enough to resort to violence in order to evict the settlers.



Jaffa Market

The shelves of Drori's dilapidated bungalow were overflowing with books. He spoke with a stammer that became so severe when he got excited that it sometimes took a full 60 seconds to finish a sentence. He received a couple of phone calls during our conversation from someone he was supposed to meet (we arrived late) but brushed him off, evidently desperate to convince me of his political position that he could see I was having trouble accepting, and frustrated at his stammering inability to speak his position clearly. A visiting friend of his from a collective farm in Israel was perched on the arm of a couch and gently chided him when he said anything too outrageous. The impression I got was of a shy, lonely man who has finally found a cause for which his society lionises him.



Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem

Next we drove up the hill to the neighbouring settlement where Bruce lives, to visit Sigal, a mother of four grown children, with a collection of chihuahua puppies to give away. She told us of the wonderful relations between Arabs and Jews in the area, relating the story of how a builder who was doing some work on her house had hurt his finger. He went to seventy different Arab doctors who told him they would need to amputate the finger. When she found out she called a Jewish doctor she knew and his finger was saved. These kind of paternalistic exaggerations are familiar to me from my own family's experience in Zimbabwe. My grandparents would tell similar stories of the happiness of their workers and their gratefulness when my grandmother would extract something stuck in an errant child's ear with tweezers. In reality of course there was always a simmering resentment under the surface, and it wasn't long before my grandparents were expelled from Zimbabwe by force.



Natural Reserve, Galilee

Finally we visited Eduardo, an Italian immigrant who subjected us to a similar barrage of defensiveness as Drori had, and it took half an hour before he finally paused long enough for me to get a question into the flood of denials and obfuscation. Both he and Bruce seemed genuinely surprised when I told them of the situation in which Eid's Bedouin village found itself, and Eduardo quickly returned the conversation to the more comfortable territory of the assault on Israel by the European media, and the tyranny of the surrounding countries.



Monastery, Latrun

On the way back to Jerusalem I expressed my frustration to Bruce. I had been very persistent in trying to come to the settlements to hear the other point of view, and found that settlers were interested in talking about absolutely anything, as long as it didn't have to do with their own role in the conflict. He didn't really seem to register what I was saying, but asked me to read a couple of articles he's written and let him know what I thought. When I got back to Jerusalem I read one which suggests that the solution to peace in the Middle East is to find a homeland for the Palestinians in Iraq. Even if he'd suggested Belgium this idea would be ridiculous.

I came away with the feeling that while settlers in relatively uncontroversial areas like the one I visited are still normal, friendly, loving people, the situation into which they have inserted themselves has caused each person to construct a personal fantasy bubble, from which he looks out at a misunderstanding world, and from which to shield himself from the quiet but unceasing criticisms of his own, long ignored conscience. The only way to defend a rhetorical glass house is to desperately throw stones at any who come to look through its hopelessly transparent walls, and build mirrors on all sides that reflect the wrong doing of the neighbours instead of his own.

Silwan

Yesterday I visited Silwan, a neighbourhood flowing down a steep slope that falls away from Jerusalem's Old City, built on the hidden ruins of what is believed to the 3,000 year old lost City of David. For the first time I began to see the outlines of an answer to the question that I've been searching for ever since I got here. All the Israelis and all the Palestinians I've met are warm, wonderful people. How did they come to be involved in such a ferocious conflict?


City of David excavations

Yoni, an Israeli peace activist, brought me first to a visitor's centre presenting the archaeological discoveries that have been made in the past hundred years or so. Like everything in Israel, the story behind the digs are as complex as the history of the place it has uncovered. The site is ostensibly a public park, created as a place where people from all over the world can come to learn about David's ancient city. However, unprecedentedly, the national park is actually owned by a private company associated with the Jewish settler movement. In order to excavate it was necessary to acquire and demolish a number of houses where Palestinian families had been living. The families didn't want their houses demolished, so the company used some fairly shady business dealings and questionable court proceedings in order to acquire the land. Under Israeli law, land that was conquered by the Israel army during the 1967 war is owned by the State unless the owners are physically present. After the war some residents left their families behind to go and work in other countries in the region, however the remaining family members were not considered "owners" by the State, and so they were physically evicted and their houses taken over. In one case, a house was shared between four siblings. The one who was still living there was allowed to stay in his room, and is now forced to share the other three rooms of the house with Jewish settlers. He can't leave for fear that his remaining room will be taken over, so he is effectively imprisoned in his own room.


Across the Valley

Most countries have constitutional guarantees to ensure that lawmakers can't get away with making these kinds of laws, however in Israel laws made before a certain date are protected from any changes, even if they are unconstitutional. The supreme court has strongly recommended that these eviction laws should not be used, but is powerless to stop anyone who chooses to do so.


Mount of Olives

After visiting the park, we walked up the hill to the Wadi Hilweh Information Center, created by the community in order to present the other side of the story to visitors to Silwan. On the way, we passed by the children's area of the centre. It was destroyed by Israeli army bulldozers two days ago after a court ruling designated it as park land. Across the road in the remaining part of the centre, founder Ahmed al Qareen was visibly deflated. He explained that his children saw the remains of their playground on their way home from school. "A national park is supposed to be built for the good of the community, so why do they destroy our children's community center?" he asked angrily. He showed us a video about the history of the area, and the conflict between settlers and Palestinian residents. The image that remains with me from the video is of a group of children throwing rocks at a settler's car coming down the hill. Two children are in the middle of the road, but the car accelerates straight into them, sending one flying into the air, who then falls and bounces sickeningly against the bonnet. The car stops momentarily, and then takes off.


Remains of Wadi Hilweh Community Centre

Thinking about this horrific image, and the thought process that must have been going on in the driver's mind, I began to understand how good men come to be extremists. The man in the car comes down the hill. Seeing people armed with rocks poised to hurl at him, he panics, stamping on the accelerator. The car crashes into the child's body and it flies into the air. Instinctively appalled by what he has just done, the man brakes. But then he realizes that he will probably be lynched, and takes off again. I imagine this man arriving at his house, terrified by what his actions say about him as a human being. The only alternative to believing that he is an insensitive monster is to rationalize his actions, to say that the child deserved it. And the only way to accept that outcome is to assume in turn that the other side themselves are monsters.

Tomorrow I'm going to visit some Jewish Settlers to hear their side of the story.

Jericho

On Thursday I said goodbye to Joni, Ludmi, Oz and Ben, who were as wonderfully warm and welcoming as Joni's family in Buenos Aires always has been. I spent the day doing a tour of the Old City of Jerusalem, and in the evening set out on my own to find something to eat. The Old City is one of those places that travel guides say you can "lose yourself in its timeless charm", and indeed I did get completely lost within 5 minutes. It took about half an hour to finally get out of the maze, as vendors rattled along the cobblestones with trolleys, yelling in Arabic and Hebrew, in the last frenetic burst of activity for the day. By the time I figured out where I was again, the last of them had evaporated into dark doorways and little lanes, the shops were all shuttered and the alleyways were eerily quiet. I almost died of a heart attack when a couple of kids jumped out from behind an archway to chase each other down the echoing steps, followed by a stream of whooping seven to ten year olds. At night time the Old City turns into the world's most intrepid, labrinthine playground. The child in me leapt excitedly after them and I had to hastily catch up with him to recover myself.



As soon as we came out of the tunnel I felt the difference. I was jammed into the back of a van full of Palestinian school kids, excitedly calling out words in English and giggling shyly. Angela, an Israeli peace activist, had invited me to accompany her on a trip to Jericho in the West Bank, where she wanted to take a look at some land for sale, and talk to Eid Abu Khamis, a representative of a Bedouin settlement under threat of eviction. In Israel even the most minor rules are strictly enforced. People stand at the traffic light waiting for the little man to turn green before crossing the street, even if there are no cars coming for miles in either direction. A couple of times I've unthinkingly walked across and received nervous stares from people waiting on the other side, glancing over their shoulders to check for a watching police car. At the collection of shops and markets at the top of the hill on the Palestinian side of the border, people cycle the wrong way down the street, cars cut each other off, hooting horns, driving over the median strip to narrowly miss pedestrians who leap out of the way, screaming insults over their shoulders. It's like taking a deep breath of fresh air.



We jumped out of one van and into another, then sat waiting for it to fill up. A friend of Angela's from the Bedouin settlement walked by, and they greeted warmly as she got in next to me. Presently we took off down the hill, flying a hundred metres past where she had to get off before the driver could get control of the van. Angela spoke to him in Arabic, and he agreed to take us past the centre of Jericho, to a place known as bananaland where the property she's interested in is located. We got out and picked our way down the gravelly slope into fields of bananas and cauliflour, then up the other side into the back of someone's house. The owner came out and smiled broadly, waving us through and opening the gate on the other side, then closing it behind us to stop the goats getting out. As we gasped up the steep hill kids came out of their houses to shout out greetings in English, and their parents waved and called Salaam Aleikum. We poked around the dusty, flat patch that had been cleared for building, and looked up at the caves cut into the cliff above, then made our way down to a road running back into down. Angela flagged down a taxi that was driving past. The driver, Nasser, agreed the price then backed up the road and drove us to his house further up the hill. He yelled something at his kids who scurried off, chatting to us in broken English until they returned with something in a plastic bag. On the way into town he saw his sister-in-law and stopped to say hello, lifting her baby through the window and holding him up to us in the back seat as he gurgled and smiled beatifically.



Nasser took us back up the highway towards Jerusalem, pulling up at a small settlement. We clambered over the waist high barrier, and were immediately set upon by a group of excitable children, who trailed us up the small slope to the shack where Eid Abu Khamis lives with his family. We sat on thin mattresses and cushions on the floor, and he and Angela spoke in a mix of Hebrew and Arabic, filling each other in on the latest developments in the community's struggle to maintain their existence. High on the hill overlooking the ramshackle Bedouin village is an Israeli settlement of clean, modern buildings. Eid has documents showing that the land on which his village lies is owned by Palestinians, who have made no protest against his family's presence there. However the Israeli army has served them an eviction notice, saying they are there illegally. The army has not served any eviction notice to the Jewish settlement on the top of the hill, which was also built on Palestinian land, and indeed the settlement is slated for expansion.



The army's strategy is to place settlements all across the West Bank, while simultaneously evicting Bedouin and Palestinians. The land is claimed for nebulously defined security reasons, eviction notices are served, and then people are removed by force if they don't respond to threats and offers of compensation. While legal battles are going on, the army employs other means to make evictees lives difficult. For three years it has stopped granting work permits to anyone in Eid's village, and recently it moved a sewage vent from down in the valley below to a very specific place in the village: right outside the window of the school.



Israel provides running water, electricity and all the modern day amenities to the settlement on the hill above Eid's village. Instead of offering land inside the settlement to the Bedouin, as it would for Jewish refugees, the government has proposed they move one kilometre from their present position to land next to a garbage dump which independent experts have classified as "unfit for human habitation". Yesterday I went to a press conference by the UN Special Raporteur on Adequate Housing, at which she gave her preliminary findings for Israel and the Occupied Territories. She said that Israel has an admirable history of providing adequate housing to millions of Jewish refugees over decades, and that the question in the case of communities like Eid's is not whether they have a right to adequate housing, it is why the government feels they must be forcibly moved in order to acquire it.



Jericho
The answer is that the government wishes to build settlements in an arc between the biggest Jewish settlement, Ma'ale Adumim, and Jerusalem, cutting a big swathe through the West Bank that will destroy the dream of a Palestinian state.

Galilee & Jerusalem

Yesterday Oz drove us North to visit a natural reserve for migratory birds, between the Sea of Galilee and the Golan Heights. We walked an 8km track, watching pelicans, storks and several other species feeding on an island in the middle. The reserve was created as a partnership between conservationists and farmers, providing food for the birds so that they don't eat crops.




Every now and then along the track there was a little hut on a stand, which Oz explained is to encourage predators like eagles to roost in the area, so that they eat rodents which would otherwise destroy crops, a novel, organic form of pesticide. The idea is now being implemented in Jordan as a collaborative project with Israeli conservationists. Surreally, as we wandered around the tranquil natural reserve, a civil war was raging just over the hills in Syria.



Ludmi and Joni

On Tuesday Joni and I took the bus to Jerusalem. We got off a couple of minutes walk from the Western Wall (aka the Wailing Wall), Judaism's holiest site. The wall is believed to be the only remaining part of King David's temple, and Jews come here to pray, and traditionally write their desire on a piece of paper and insert it into a crack in the wall. I've already got used to being scanned and having my bag x-rayed when entering shopping malls and bus stations. I was surprised that the checkpoint outside the wall was no more thorough. The soldiers seemed relaxed, and in the square in front of the wall there were a lot of kids messing about and people smiling for photos




I followed Joni through the gate to the men's section of the wall, putting on a yarmulke (skull cap) which is obligatory for visits, regardless of your beliefs. A rabbi immediately walked up to me and for a moment I thought he was going to kick me out. Are you Jewish? he asked. No, I replied, bracing, but he smiled, welcomed me and gave me a pamphlet explaining the wall's significance to Jews. I looked up at the twenty metres or so of huge stone bricks. In the corner, a group of men chanted, nodding and holding the hebrew bible close to their face. Along the wall others sat in white plastic chairs, stood behind lecterns, or simply leaned their heads close to the stone and rocked back and forth gently, murmuring. The wall has a dark mark about the height of a person from being touched by so many hands and foreheads, and little pieces of paper are wedged into every crack in its surface. I stood for several minutes, soaking in the deep, rich spirituality of the place, watching the faithful with eyes closed and faces wrought with sadness and desire, contemplating the ability of a surface so unforgivingly impervious to receive so much raw emotion.



Western Wall and Dome of the Rock

We climbed up through the Old City, winding our way through the market, getting lost several times, and eventually following a trail of Russian tourists to the place where several branches of Christianity believe that Jesus was buried, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.



Western Wall

All the main factions claim primacy, and the monks from each branch of Christianity who preside over the church have periodically murdered each other over such issues as the right to clean a particular part of the monument. In 1767, the ruling empire split responsibilities between the sects, but the violence continued for another century, and in 1853 the frustrated sultan decreed that however things were on that particular day would remain the status quo forever. The competing monks took his decree so literally and seriously that to this day a ladder that happened to be leaning against the wall on the balcony out the front has not been moved for one and a half centuries.
The fighting continues in modern times. "On a hot summer day in 2002, a Coptic monk moved his chair from its agreed spot into the shade. This was interpreted as a hostile move by the Ethiopians, and eleven were hospitalized after the resulting fracas." (wikipedia) Fights also broke out in 2004 and 2008.



Church of the Holy Sepulchre

Every year the Orthodox church celebrates the miracle of the holy fire, in which a flame spontaneously appears on candles inside the tomb of Jesus, which are then brought out by the patriarch and spread through the assembled multitude. The combination of religious fervor and fire has caused several stampedes and mass burnings though the ages. At one stage rumour got around that a child conceived during the miracle of the holy fire would have special powers, and for several years the festival turned into a stampeding, burning, religious orgy.



Rotunda

Watching chubby Russians in bright pink track pants take photos of themselves kissing various bits of rock is not very conducive to divine inspiration, nor is the gold and silver knickknackery that is splashed about every crevice, nor the teams of monks in distinctive styles of robes wandering round with bored expressions swinging smoking cans. I couldn't help comparing it to the simplicity and sanctity of the Western Wall, and wondering how this group of buffoons ever came to be the caretakers of one of the holiest sites in Christendom.



Joni and Dirk at the Western Wall

See all my photos of the natural reserve and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on flickr.

Haifa, Caesarea, Metzada, Dead Sea

Yesterday Joni and I took the train up the coast to Haifa, a beach city in the North of Israel. There were soldiers everywhere, as Israelis must do three years of military service between 18 - 21, and on Sunday many travel to their bases. Something that I was immediately struck by, walking around on my first day here, is the diversity of Israelis. Jews don't focus on conversion like some branches of Christianity, so I had no idea there were black Jews (many are Ethiopian), and assumed that Scandinavian-looking Jews were a rarity. But people repeatedly say things to me in Hebrew, assuming that I'm an Israeli, and to me Israel seems as diverse as a European country like France. Arabic Israelis lead a relatively separate existence, however there are points of confluence, for example the Bedouin are proud of their military service. The issue of genetics is extremely sensitive in Israel, but it seems likely that a large proportion of West Bank (Palestinian) arabs are in fact unknowing descendents of Jews who were forcibly converted to Islam by empires that tore through this part of the world centuries ago. The whole question of who has a right to be in which place is fraught with uncertainty, viewed from the long perspective of the entire history of this area, in which borders changed every couple of hundred years with the latest empire, many switched religions accordingly and determining who is of which ethnicity is a never-ending chase down warrens of DNA trails that all lead back to somewhere in Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago, well before nation states could even be conceived of.





Haifa Bahai Temple

We visited the gardens of a Bahai temple, and then took the train South to Caesearea, an ancient city that was built and rebuilt several times by various empires. Part of it had been closed for the day by the time we arrived, but the most interesting thing for me was the remains of the city walls. The Roman representative, Herod, built an enormous temple with imposing collonades, which slowly crumbled over the centuries, until the next empire came along and used it as scrap to build its own walls, and so on. So amongst the giant blocks of limestone and dirt that make up the wall you'll suddenly come across a magnificent plinth or a piece of marble column, or a bust with some emperors face on it from an earlier century who the builders didn't care enough about to give it a more appropriate home than sticking out sideways from between a couple of grimy blocks of limestone.




Caesarea

This morning Oz drove us down to the lowest point on earth, the Dead Sea. Due to some strange movements of tectonic plates, it actually lies about 400m below sea level. I was looking forward to a day of excessive floating, but Oz unexpectedly turned left and headed up a windy road away from the sea, into the dusty cliffs that tower over it. It turns out Herod was down here as well (the same Herod who ruled in Jesus' time), and built a palace on top of a great shaft of earth that juts 300m into the air, surrounded by steep cliffs on all sides, Metzada. At some stage in the first century the Jews got sick of paying Roman taxes and revolted, taking over the palace and using it as a refuge. The Romans weren't too pleased by this turn of events, as Herod had installed some pretty nifty bath houses in the palace, but there's no good way of attacking vertically upwards, so they laid siege to the fortress for a month, and in the mean time piled up dirt into a massive ramp against one of its sides. Finally they got close enough to build a wooden tower and attack, although their initial attack was repelled. That night the rebels decided that they would rather die free than live as slaves, and committed mass suicide, drawing lots for who would be the last 10 men to kill the others, and who would be the last man to kill the last 9. I suspect the women weren't even consulted about the plan.




Metzada

In any event it makes for a cracking story, so they made a Hollywood movie about it, built a cable car and put bannisters along the trail that snakes up the side of the cliff. My fear of heights returned with a force as soon as the cable car took off, and I spent the first half an hour shying away from the edge like a mountain goat with ice skates on, but the site is so impressive that I couldn't help being overwhelmed by the sheer audacity required to have built it, and the stark beauty of the moonscape stretching away on either side between cliffs and salty sea.




Inside a water storage tank cut into the rock

Afterwards I did get my chance to cover my body with mineral rich mud, float unusually high in the unusually salty water, and giggle with a bunch of fat pasty Englishmen as we turned from side to side and tried not to flip over. It's almost like being in a canoe.




Metzada
Tomorrow, Jerusalem. For now, check out all my photos of Haifa, Caesarea, Metzada and the Dead Sea.



Don't try to steal my vegemite

Templars

View over the valley

I looked out the window of the fort. In the distance on one side I could see the outlines of Tel Aviv, on the Mediterranean. On the other, the foothills beyond which lie the holy city, Jerusalem. The Knights Templar formed in around 1100, to protect pilgrims who had to pass through the badlands between Jaffa on the coast (where I was yesterday) and Jerusalem. Their network grew out from the Middle East to cover much of Europe, so that a pilgrim could deposit valuables in, say, London, and retrieve them once safely in Jerusalem, perhaps the first precursor to today's system of banks and cheques. In the 1300s they had become too powerful, and most were dispatched in the favoured manner of medieval monarchs - forced to confess and burnt at the stake. According to Dan Brown they had a side business in hiding Jesus' descendents, and later morphed into the Freemasons, however no serious historians endorse this story (because they don't want you to know the truth!)



The lookout

The ruins are surrounded by vineyards, olive groves and wheat fields in the valley below, and trees growing up the sides of the rolling hills beyond. The view was probably pretty similar when it was built, although the highway would have been dusty and spotted with pilgrims rather than cars, and you would have been able to see all the way to Jaffa and the glimmering Mediterranean that is now blocked by skyscrapers in Tel Aviv.



Trenches run through the complex

Joni found a piece of pottery stuck in the mud that looks like part of the base of a jar used for storing grain. It was probably used by the Templars a thousand years ago, although he said he was going to clean it, give it to his girlfriend and tell her Jesus used it for making mate. After almost falling through a hole into a subterranean storage cavern, I remarked to Oz that in any other country this kind of site would have guard rails and signs all over the place, a visitors centre selling trinkets and swarms of giddy tourists posing with tunics and accidentally lopping each others' heads off with heavy swords. He laughed and replied that on the coastal planes alone there are over 5,000 ruins that are still mostly buried because they are too numerous to excavate.



Inside a storage room

Afterwards we went to the picnic area of Canada Park, which includes the Templar fort, a monastery and a swathe of territory around it. We lay around on the grass with hundreds of other families, and I went for a wander up the hill to get a better view. I looked up the park when I got home and learned that it was created after two Arab villages on the site were razed and their 10,000 residents were expelled during the 1967 Six Day War, on the orders of General Yitzhak Rabin (later an Israeli Prime Minister, who was assassinated in 1995 after receiving the Nobel Peace prize, by a Jewish fundamentalist who considered him too soft on Arabs). I'm not going to write about politics today (I will later), but it seems like in Israel it's impossible to avoid history for long, ancient and recent alike.



View of the complex from its highest point

Check out the rest of the photos on flickr.

Arrival, Jaffa

The man sitting next to me wound a black cord around his arm, from his wrist all the way up to his shoulder, took out a prayer book and began intoning the words softly. As I watched the snowy runway haloing his gently knodding features slip behind us, I was struck by the suddenness with which history can change. 60 years ago, who would have imagined that I would be sitting next to this man, about to take off from German soil en route to the Jewish homeland?





Jaffa Market

I had spent the previous four months ploughing through 3000 years and 600 pages of Jerusalem, The Biography, but I realized as soon as we started talking that I had only scratched the surface of Israel's fascinating history. Yehoshua was born in Venezuela, moved with his family to Brazil at two, studied medicine in the United States for several years and then finally moved to Israel where he married an Algerian and got a job working at the department of Health. He told me that his story is not that unusual in Israel, a place in which every resident has overcome challenges to be there. I asked how he squares his scientific training with his religious belief, and he smiled widely. "I give talks about this stuff!" His answers were as interesting for their format as for their content. Any philosophical point was made through stories, usually taken from the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible), much as Jesus answered disciples questions in the New Testament.





Jaffa Mosque

He explained that Hebrew, the descendent of Aramaic that is spoken in modern day Israel, finds the roots of many of its words in numbers. Each letter represents a number, much like Roman numerals. For example the first letter is 1, the 11th letter is 20, and so on. The word for hand is composed of the letters for 10 and 4, because the hand's fingers and thumb are made up of 14 segments between joints. The word for hold, as in, hold with both hands, is derived from 2 x 14. The relationship between language and mathematics goes deeper. Geometry is part of the language itself. The famous linguistics example of Inuits having many words for snow came to mind, and I wondered about the effect having such an intuitive understanding of mathematics from the time you learn your first words must have on how you perceive the world. To test the waters I mentioned Noam Chomsky, linguistics expert and fierce critic of Israel but Yehoshua bristled so I dropped it.





San

As we walked off the plane I was immediately singled out by security for having a beard (apparently a capital offence in Israel, the United States and Australia) so Yehoshua and I shook hands and parted. At customs I was questioned a second time, and then sent to the interrogation room. But before they could get out the feathers to tickle me into submission, a guy who looked like he strangles baby penguins for a living asked me where I was staying and for how long, then cut off the answer to the second question with a curt instruction to have a good time in Israel.





Oz, Ben, Ludmi, Joni

Joni and Oz, his brother-in-law, were waiting for me as I came out the doors, exhilarated to finally be here. Oz drove us back to his apartment just outside Tel Aviv, where he and Ludmi live with their one and a half year old son, Ben. On the ride Oz laughed about the numbers stuff, he said that some mystics spend an entire lifetime studying it, and he knows at least one person who started to think in numbers instead of words, and went crazy. I smiled, but I was only half listening as I stared out the windows at this place that I've read and heard and seen so much about, but was subtly different in every aspect. I commented that even the light here seems to have a different quality, and Joni joked that that's because it's holy. That night we ate fried bread with hummus, blended tomato and several weird salty and spicy things that tasted amazing, and drank Maccabee beer, recommended by Yehoshua as being "good, as in good cost/benefit".





Waiting for Aladdin

This morning Joni dragged Ludmi and I on a 7am run around the neighbourhood (it seems no one told him I'm on holiday). The buildings are unlike any I've ever seen before, flat on all sides and made of a kind of limestone that apparently is only used in Israel. There are palm and olive trees everywhere, but it's also much greener than I would have imagined. I immediately noticed the intensity of land use, which makes sense given that the entire state of Israel is not much bigger than greater Buenos Aires. My Dad visited in the 1960s as an agricultural economist to study Israel's water conservation methods in agricultural production, and Yehoshua mentioned that Israel reuses 80% of its waste water to grow crops, something that he is currently studying at the Department of Health to see if it causes any health problems (from toxins in waste water).





Jaffa Fort

At around 9:30 we drove to the historic coastal city of Jaffa. It was here that Saladin, one of Islam's most celebrated and famously tolerant rulers was finally defeated by crusader Richard the Lionheart in 1192. Standing on a wall skirting a square at the top of the ancient fort, Oz beckoned me over and pointed at the sand between the palm trees. "You see that?" he asked, and I followed his finger to a piece of terracotta. "Every time it rains, thousands of Israelis go out and look around in the sand for bits of pottery, coins, whatever gets revealed when the water washes away the sand." Israel has been settled and resettled so many times that there are layers upon layers of history sitting literally just below its surface. A friend of his living in a kibbutz, no where near any current settlement, has a collection of 2,000 coins from myriad empires, discovered in the furrows made every time the plow turns over earth in the fields.





Oz haggles with a coin dealer

We wandered through the flea market for a couple of hours. I went off on my own for a while to buy some cotton pants, for which I bargained the seller down from 45 to 35 shekels (about $10). When we sat down for lunch I realized they'd been stolen out of the top of my bag, so I went back with Joni to buy them again, telling him proudly we wouldn't need to bargain, I'd already taken care of that. On hearing him speak Hebrew the seller immediately offered them to him for 30 shekels, which he refused, and the guy in the next shop gave them to us for 20.





Tel Aviv, from Jaffa Fort

I'm still pretty jet lagged, so we headed home around 5pm. I'm planning to update this blog each day that I'm here, so check back tomorrow. In the mean time you can see all my photos of Jaffa on flickr.