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