March 20 Entry from the Sea of Galilee

My friend Jefi was kind enough to answer the question posed in the last entry concerning the origin and/or meaning of my emotional response to being in Israel. So succinct, so perfect that I will directly quote it here. "I think that anyone with a Judeo/Christian background or even a profound love of history is moved on visiting Israel. I have heard this so many times from so many people. It's where so much actually took place. Whether one is of the Christian persuasion, Jewish or Muslim...where your feet tread so did all...Roman soldiers, Jesus, John the Baptist, Persians, Egyptians, the first cultivating...it makes me tingle just thinking about it. It's where everything started...the beginnings. It's a place of love and hate, peace and war, desolation and lushness, growth and destruction. if quantum physics is right, the whole country is absolutely vibrating with the energy of the past! It is where your history lies and for that reason I think, it resonates within you much more deeply than the far east."

Let me say, in addition, that I have completely fallen in love with Tel Aviv. A lively but not huge, secular, ambitious but romantic city filled with people trying to fulfill a dream of Israel without an extremist edge. I would return here in a moment and suspect that I probably will.
My four days in Tel Aviv were truly wonderful. Five of ten of the Israeli contingent in my Kennedy School Mid-Career MPA program 2001-2002 made time to see me. I was wined, dined and entertained by each of these people of whom I had become so fond seven years ago. It is a testimony to the intensity and powerful emotional impact of that program that friendships this strong can be picked up where they left off that long ago.

Several of these people are very visible figures in the Israeli public and/or occupy extremely controversial and powerful positions so I will not name them. Each lives in Tel Aviv, however, and three of the five are right around forty and each is busy having babies while occupying important professional positions. I met one woman with her three month old daughter in a lovely urban neighborhood for dinner. The number of strollers passing by, children cavorting with their parents on the sidewalks, and obviously strong Israeli family entity was palpable. I loved it! The Israeli government is highly supportive of all things family. My friend was the beneficiary of help with artificial insemination along with maternity leave and excellent health care for herself and her baby who is named Rainbow in Hebrew.

I was so aware of the intensity with which the Israelis live. Three are having babies with great joy. The other two have nearly grown children, more than half of whom are in or have been in the Israeli Defense Force. Hovering in the background of all this family activity - at least in my mind as I observed it - is an awareness of the threat of danger and isolation that can never be very far from consciousness. My instantly recognizable newscaster friend took me to the nightclub his pregnant-with-twins wife owns and as I watched and participated in the every Wednesday night tradition of a packed house of people singing popular Israeli songs, dancing on the tables, laughing, smoking, drinking, and having a ball, I nevertheless couldn’t put out of my mind that these were the grandchildren and great grandchildren of the people whose stories I would see chronicled in the Yad Vashem holocaust museum in Jerusalem.

I spent Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday in Tel Aviv at the City Hotel. Two blocks from the Mediterranean, it was great. Each morning I walked miles on the beach. One of my friends took me to brunch with his wife and two friends- also pregnant - along the sea to the north of Tel Aviv. Secular or religious, most families observe Shabbat and while he does not come from an observant family, he committed himself to uphold the traditions which she holds dear. All the preparations for Friday’s family dinner are completed before sundown. Each and every Friday night, families dine, celebrate, and commune together in one of their homes. Schools and work places let out at about noon. At my friends suggestion, I walked down along the bars and restaurants on the sea in downtown Tel Aviv in the late afternoon. There were throngs of people and families enjoying the sunshine, having a late lunch and a glass of wine or cappuccino. At five the crowds began to thin and by six, the scene was deserted. Literally, the city shuts down - although not as completely as in Jerusalem where many more ultra orthodox Jews live. There, the streets are literally chained off and anyone mistakenly attempting to operate a car or any other mechanical device might well be jeered if not stoned. I was able to get a coffee at about six near the hotel but interestingly, the automatic doors of the hotel were blocked and one gained entrance through a manual door. The elevators did operate; breakfast was served and some of the food was warm but all had been prepared the day beforeand kept warm. Apparently the food may be served warm on the Sabbath but the warmers may not be turned on that day..... Some elevators operate on automatic pilot, stopping automatically at each floor all day long so that no one has to push the actual button....

While some of this ritual activity verges on the absurd in terms of legalistic silliness, the dedication of twenty four hours to family meals, quiet, reflection, shutting out of the world of shopping and consumption and just plain busyness seems extremely appealing to me. I realized that only once a year in America do we have anything like this suspension of the real world and that is at Christmas. Wouldn’t it be lovely to bring that kind of peace and togetherness into our lives more often?

On Saturday morning, I hitched a ride with the military man, his wife and one son to Jerusalem where they go every other week to have lunch with their other son who is in the military there. The road from the sea shore of Tel Aviv through the foothills and mountains to Jerusalem about forty minutes away is magnificent - green, pine treed, rolling. Acres of olive trees, pines actually brought from America, and rocks line the way. It was a gorgeous ride, quiet and free of traffic because probably more than half of the population doesn’t drive on the Sabbath.

By the time I reached Jerusalem, grabbed a cab to my friend Beth’s house and started a load of wash, it was cold and gloomy. Beth is a management officer at the US Consulate in Jerusalem. While the US Embassy is in Tel Aviv and interacts with the government of Israel (which is located in Jerusalem but the Palestinians object to that since the 1967 takeover and the US insists on the pretense that the government of Israel lives in Tel Aviv), the US Consulate General in Jerusalem is the interlocutor with the Palestinians. It happens that my previous direct boss, the Deputy Chief of Mission in Athens, is and has been for four years the consul general in Jerusalem, not a job to be envied.

My childhood friend Diana’s friend Jane who now lives in London but was previously stationed with the British Council in Mexico City had connected me with her friend Candace whose husband is with a major US newspaper in Jerusalem now. I met her for lunch, a delightful meeting of a couple of minds trying to wrestle with the contradictions of Israel. From both Candace and Beth I immediately picked up the notion that one cannot ever get away from "the situation." It is never far from the surface in any conversation. Many insist that the state of Israel, haven to the oppressed Jews of the world has become the oppressor. Later in the trip one sees the wall running along the west side of the West Bank of the Jordan River. Everyone knows the religious identification of every neighborhood in Jerusalem and it is as divided a city as any can be without a concrete wall running down the middle. "The situation" colors everything and the power of the Orthodox sects which live completely on the dole of the state because they are dedicated to "study" only and who have at least ten children each is ubiquitous. The city is absolutely shut down from sundown on Friday till Saturday. Candace and I had lunch in one of the three restaurants open on a Saturday afternoon. As I said earlier, a car wandering into the Orthodox area truly risks being stoned. Everyone who is not on one side or the other simply tries to stay disengaged from anyone who IS on one side. Which makes for a difficult living situation. Foreign service officers and, I’m sure, journalists, want to engage with the people of the country in which they are guests and it isn’t much fun trying to NOT talk about the realities.

Beth and I "hung out" on Saturday evening and drove to the ancient mountaintop city of Masada built by Harod the Great overlooking the Dead Sea. On this mountain top, the entire Jewish population committed suicide rather than succumb to the seige of the Roman legions below. Don’t ask me the exact chronology but presumably they had taken over this Roman city during the rebellion of 70 AD and the Romans were trying to get the city back.... More of the same. God is always on everyone’s side.....

Soooo.... On Saturday night at 10:00 pm I checked into the Prima Palace Hotel. It seems that hotels also observe the Sabbath so guests cannot check out, rooms are not cleaned, and nothing can happen until the sun goes down. Elderhostel had arranged for me to be able to check in a night before the rest of the group arrived and at their significantly lower rate. The hotel is located in a heavily Orthodox neighborhood in the Israeli (western) side of Jerusalem. I’d call it a three star probably.

On Sunday at 6:00 we had our first get-together for introductions and biographies. The biggest surprise was the number of people traveling alone. Not just women in pairs as one might expect but husbands and wives whose spouse was not interested in travel at all or at least with this particular trip. In order to avoid paying the single supplement, I had signed up for a roommate but, lucky for me, each of the other singles HAD paid it so I got off free. Lucky thing, too, because the room was mighty small.

So, yeah, they’re old - but then so am I. Nice people, smart people, educated and successful people, many former or current educators, well traveled people. Besides the cruise which is slightly different (there are 600 people and you aren’t schlepping around as a group at all times) this was my first tour group. I think the oldest is 84 and the youngest is actually younger than I am.

I won’t give a long description of the places we have been, the things we have seen except for a list in order to refresh my own memory when I am sitting in a rocking chair on the front porch twenty five years from now. We visited places I had been before like the Dome of the Rock, the Western or Wailing Wall, the Mount of Olives, and the Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial. The latter was crowded and we were rushed through with our guide without the chance to also see the Children’s Memorial, one of the most moving places I have ever been. What I was not prepared for was the beauty and poignancy of the whole Sea of Galilee area. I have no religious affiliation nor allegiance. Jesus is a historical figure who brought a message of love and forgiveness into the world which promptly ignored it and began killing in the name of the church it had spawned. But to walk on the ground and imagine the scene where Jesus walked, preached, purportedly performed miracles, went to weddings, collected and charged a group of disciples was far more moving than I would have anticipated. The lake sits low in the Jordan River valley, a verdant and peaceful agricultural area wreaking with history. We stayed in a Kibbutz cum hotel for two nights and the whole experience was wonderful.

On the way to the Galilee we also visited the ruins of Caesaria, a complete Roman town built right on the Mediterranean, half way between Tel Aviv and Haifa. Herod the Great, an obsequious Roman want-to-be but, in fact, the King of Israel or whatever it was called at the time, built this brand new city where no city had been before - a real first - on a beautiful harbor; he chose the spot because it had no association with anything Jewish or religious. I think he died before he ever got to spend a night there but it is a fabulous ruin.

We continued on up the coast, had lunch in and toured Akko, one of the oldest settlements in the world and an ancient harbor on the major trade routes from the east. We drove through Haifa which turns out to be a really appealing ancient city also on the sea and built on hills that roll down to it. I loved what I saw of it.

In sum, I love Israel and for different reasons than I had left with four years ago. There is enough to see, experience and feel here that one could easily spend two weeks. I said when I left on this trip that I would probably never pass this way(s) again but I would jump at the chance to return to Israel. While it was Jerusalem which caught my imagination last time, it was Tel Aviv, the thriving Mediterranean city, and the northern area around the Galilee and Golan Heights that drew me this time.

Jefi is right. This land is the home of our myths, the religious education of our childhoods even if that education didn’t "take," our ethical and moral compasses, our history and our literature. Not only the history of the Jews and the Christians but heavily the Greeks, Romans, and Byzantines upon which Western civilization is based all converge here.

They also clash with the rest of the history of the area. The spread of Islam and its 1500 year old ownership of the land. The travesty of colonial empires and their later demise. The carving up of the whole world east and south of western Europe by those same colonial powers in such a way that constant warfare and ethnic clashes were bound to result. The Holocaust. The Zionist movement and the sense that the world truly owed the Jewish people a refuge and a land of their own, the first land they had ever "owned." The pushing out of the people who were native to that land at the time. The refusal of the rest of the Arab world to do anything for those people except use them a pawn in their own games of propaganda.

And on and on. Where does it stop? Most of the people I have talked to, Israelis themselves and their observers, those who have spent years studying and working on the issues, and the people invited to speak to us by Elderhostel expect little. The problem is truly intractable and the more deaths that occur, the more intractable it becomes.

I was reminded at dinner tonight, however, that twenty years ago apartheid in South Africa was equally intractable. It was assumed that the impoverished underclass majority population (which the Israeli Arab population will also be before long) could never be allowed to take over their own government and live in peace with those who had settled in their land several generations earlier and claimed it for their own. But it happened. Somehow people got over it. Not simple. Not all the problems solved. But a solution which everyone seems to be able to live with and no bloodbath.

Everyone assumes that if there is ever a solution it will be a two state one. How that gets worked out given physical realities here is more than I can imagine. George Mitchell negotiated a peace in Ireland which has not only held but this very week when two policemen were killed there both communities rallied in solidarity against the violence. Tony Blair, too, has spent the last year as the EU (or is it the UN?) Special envoy to the Middle East. If I were one to pray, I would be praying that now might be the time, the window, the opportunity for peace in this holy land.