Taking Your Camera on the Road

I’ve been so neglectful in writing just a simple letter. I’ve been working on three books now, in addition to the over 200 articles I wrote for our new web page last summer, and so my writing is work and not pleasure, though my work is my pleasure. Simple letter writing gets left behind on the back burner.

In spite of what you are hearing and seeing on television, many people came here this summer for tours and three month stays in the kibbutzim (kibbutzes) programs. The police commander of NY is here right now in support of what Israel, as are many people. Tourism is down about 50% from what they expected, but that means that the other 50% of the tourists showed up, and enjoyed the lack of crowds and the welcome of the tourist businesses.

We had a great deal of fun when my mom was here, and then again with our friends, Bruce and his buddy, Wes, exploring the whole country from top to bottom, all of the west and only a little of the east. Brent’s parents are arriving in about eight weeks, and we can’t wait to show off the wonderful area here.

The ancient Christian and Jewish ruins in Hebron are sorta off limits from time to time, but few people ever go there anyway as part of their tour package. Bethlehem is open to Christian tourists, but few go there and there is only one small thing to see and hardly worth anyone’s time anyway, though it is symbolic to the Christians. Jerusalem is wide open and ready to explore, and the northern areas of Tiberias, the Sea of Galilee (Kinneret), and Nazareth are wide open and totally safe. Hasn’t been anything in those areas at all. Oh, I think there was one protest thing but it fizzled last year in Nazareth, but that had more to do with the building of a mosque than it did with the Palestinian thing.

Israel is such a place of contrasts. Tel Aviv, where we live, is new but feels old compared to American standards. It has a Pioneer Square (Seattle) feeling to much of the city. Yet Pioneer Square is older than Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv was built on the sand dunes just north of the old city of Jaffa (Yafo) 90 years ago. Now Tel Aviv encompasses Yafo, more like a suburb, like a neighborhood in a big city.

Where I live was once considered the very edge of town. Old taxi drivers tell me about parking their cars on the edge of town, with buildings on one side and sand dunes and scrub rolling off towards the Judean mountains on the other. The last street in town for a long time was Ibn Givrol. I now live one small block east of that and the city reaches out to fill much of the land that heads towards those same mountains. Tel Aviv has new skyscrapers and buildings to rival any new city in the world, and it continues to grow at a pace faster than most other cities in the world.

Leaving Tel Aviv and heading towards one of the oldest cities in the world, Jerusalem, one of the most stark landmarks you first see is “Mount Tel Aviv”. The mountain rises up out of the flat ground like something left behind in an ice age. Unfortunately, its tale is much simpler. It is a gigantic mountain of garbage. Israel may have one of the world’s most incredible and efficient irrigation systems for agricultural land, and it may have the most technologically advanced capabilities in the new “Silicon Wadi” alternative for Silicon Valley, supplying incredible computer and medical technology to the rest of the world, but when it comes to recycling and protecting the environment, Israel is in the dark ages.

After Mount Tel Aviv, whose sides turn green during the rare rainy part of the winter, you pass the new Ben Gurion 2000 airport under construction and a couple years behind schedule. The highway is being remodeled to accommodate the new on and off ramps for the new airport, but so far much of it resembles the I-90 interchange nightmare of Seattle for so many years. Roads and ramps leading off to nowhere as they work every so slowly to finish the project. Beyond the construction is the current airport which will eventually be blended in with the new one. On the east side of the airport you will find huge warehouse hangers where Brent works at Tahsha Ahvereet (Israel Aircraft Industries).

Keep going and you will eventually come to farm lands on the north side of the highway, but a glance to the south side, especially at night, you will find a gigantic Christmas Tree. A factory of some kind, I’m not sure what, is absolutely covered with what looks like small white Christmas lights from a distance. Returning from Jerusalem at night the factory looks like a giant cruise ship lit up out on the dark water. During the day you can hardly see it for the grey tones against the grey landscape of the desert.

Every time I start the ascent of the mountains to Jerusalem my emotions jumble up in confusion. First, it is a wondrous and amazing experience to drive through this narrow cut in the mountains, the walls slanting up and away from you, newly transplanted trees struggling to survive in the lack of water and harsh temperatures dotting the rugged mountainsides. The road twists and slants and zooms up and then straight down and back up again, not so different from the precarious nature of the old Highway 2 to Leavenworth. The cars whipping in and out at high speeds along a road familiar to everyone driving it, except me, add to the fear and panic of the adventure as the lanes begin at four across and drop to two then three then to two and then down to one and then back open again as the mountains and recent construction allows.

Between the wonder and the terror I am also seized with regrets and sorrow for alongside the road are the remains of ancient vehicles, mostly jeeps and trucks, seemingly abandoned by the side of the road. A closer look reveals them to be painted with rust resistant paints and decorated with small plaques and bullet scars. If we paused to examine these strange relics, the plaques would explain that these vehicles have been left here on purpose as a reminder of those who were shot down and killed trying to cross the line to get into Jerusalem during the War of Independence in 1948. By the end of the war, Israel had finally pushed through the blockades of the mountains and laid claim to the western side of Jerusalem.

The walls of the old city of Jerusalem along the west side near the Damascus Gate followed the “green line” border between the new state of Israel and Jordan. Israel has war and terrorism memorials all over the country but this stark reminder of those who died to free Jerusalem seems to cut right to the heart as you imagine the drivers and passengers trying to drive through a hail storm of bullets to break the line and dying right where the vehicle now rests over 50 years later.

If I’m not driving, I tend to want to close my eyes against the cascading impact of the emotions flooding my heart. I don’t know if I will ever get used to the feeling of going through these mountains, but it does grow less every time.

As we climb the last hill into the city, I expect to see and feel the wonder and peace of the ancient city of Jerusalem, symbolic home to three major religions and a lot of minor ones, but instead it is an immediate assault on the senses of a big city out of control with some serious bad planning. When Israel gained control of the west side of the city, they immediately went to work building and tearing up and down what they could to create their future capital city. From what was once small isolated neighborhoods outside the walled city, it is a hodge podge of every style, construction type, and building height you can image.

Maneuvering through the new city, you are once again assaulted by the contrasts and dichotomy that is Israel. Everything is old and new and very old and very new and a little of everything in between. Suffering for centuries of war and control by different rulers and countries, Jerusalem hardly resembles anything of the times before, just the time now, which is enough for the old weary city. When the next conquerors come, and they will, it will shift and change again.

My favorite part is the old city of Jerusalem. I love the giant walls that tower over me as I stand before them feeling small and powerless against all who have come before me and who are now lost to the dust of time.

I usually enter through Jaffa Gate, a major entrance to the old city. It opens into the Christian Quarter by the Tower of David Museum. Part of the mystery of the city for modern tourists is to relate to what is compared to what was and this museum is a prime example in many ways, starting first with its name. Called a citadel by the locals, the location was originally a palace built by Herod in the first century BCE. After much destruction and rebuilding, by the time the Romans occupied the city in 70 CE(AD), the palace had become a fortress as it is an ideal location for overlooking the entire city, especially the west side. The mystery of the name, Tower of David, isn’t solved but hinted at by early text from the last of the Crusaders who claimed that this was the palace of King David. The impregnable fortress was the last challenge for the conquerors, who used what remained of its towers as symbols to defeat. When the later Christian tourists came to Jerusalem, they continued to believe that this was the palace of King David and the tower, actually 17th century minaret built by the Turks who ruled at that time, became known as Kind David’s Tower, a site visible from just about everywhere in the city.

The reality is that David, in this area over 1000 years before, never set foot in that area which was just a rocky hillside when Herod built his palace. Ah, what little credit Herod gets for his great works of architecture in Israel.

Let us not forget that Herod totally rebuilt the entire city of Jerusalem to his specifications 1000 years after David, destroying what little remained after the First Temple was destroyed in 586 BCE (it was built in the 10th century BCE by King Solomon), and rebuilding the Second Temple and it’s surrounding area (originally first built in 516 BCE) creating the largest sacred site in the entire Roman Empire. Herod built the great retaining walls around the temple that makes up what we call the “wailing wall” in the remains found today. So why does David get the credit for a place he never visited?

Part of that is answered by the significance to the Jews and Christians about the legend of David, the boy who would be king who slew the great giant, who happened to be a Philistine….Palestine….interesting connection, isn’t it? Anyway, David plays such a role in the “founding” of the Jewish and basis for the Christian religions that the early tourists just assumed that the old citadel/fortress must be the remains of his original city and palace. They were a few kilometers off. Once an idea takes hold in the minds of humans, it takes forever to prove it wrong. The Israel Tourist and Archeological Boards have renamed it The Citadel. While they are trying to get new tour books and maps to name it appropriately, they still put “Tower of David” in parentheses or ignore the new name completely and stick which what people expect. So it goes trying to change people’s minds.

It was to this museum Brent and I came in October of last year right after the fighting broke out. Brent was terrified of the riots and violence but I assured him that we would be far from it and safe. I was determined to see Dale Chihuly’s glass exhibit which arrived about the same time as we did, a year before, and was supposed to close that weekend. In the end it stayed on exhibit for a few more months as no one from Seattle wanted to come to Israel to dismantle it. They, too, watched too much television.

The exhibit was beautiful, especially seeing it at night with all the lights making the glass glow in unearthly colors around the ancient ruins and partially restored fortress. It made me homesick to see such familiar exhibits of his shell collection, the sea urchins and the Japanese glass balls which Brent promptly dubbed “Christmas Tree balls and decorations”.

The highest point of the fortress in the tower offers the best view of Jerusalem, looking out over the old city to the east and then the rest of the vast new city to the north, south and west. We stood up there in the slight mountain chill of the evening looking over and down towards the Western Wall (Wailing Wall) and its brightly lit courtyard and the glowing dome of the El-Aska Mosque, or Dome of the Rock, above the wall. The scene of recent massive protests and violence, you could hear a pin drop in the late night of the city below us. Amazing how quickly things change.

If you walk pass through the Jaffa Gate entrance into the Christian quarter, and down David Street, you are only a few steps from the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the supposed site of the crucifixion. You hardly find it as you weave through the narrow sloped streets and twist around.

It its latest incarnation, the old city is designed on the basis of the ancient arab medinas, a city within a city within walls that twist and turn and confuse any attacker. It is a maze and it takes time to learn the main streets, and a step down one of the side streets can lead you to all kinds of sights and sounds and get you lost. Everyone is very helpful and friendly in the old city and they are always willing to help you find your way back to a known path, of course after you peruse their vast selection of do-dads and knickknacks.

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is a work of art celebrating the gaudiest artistry of human history. Resembling the old city, it is a hodge-podge of rooms and levels going off in different directions all at once. The popular spots in the church are the crucifixion spot, “the slab” of marble which Jesus’ body was supposedly laid out on in preparation for burial, and a small “tomb” or chapel that supposedly hosts the remainder of the stone from which Jesus rose after his death. Early pilgrims chipped away at it so only something the size of an old full volume dictionary remains protected behind a glass box. People kiss and touch the glass box with reverence as they crouch in this small shrine temple within a temple.

Also suffering from many incarnations, little or nothing remains of the ancient church built by Queen Helena in 326, nor of its successors. In the 12th century the Crusaders finally built part of what remains today. In the bible it says (John 19: 17) that “bearing His Cross went forth into a place called the place of a skull, which is called in the Hebrew – Golgotha.” Gulgoleth is Hebrew for skull. Ancient medieval tradition says that the skull of Adam was buried on this hillside and that when Christ was crucified, some of His blood flowed and touched Adam’s skull and restored it to life for a moment. The Hebrew word Gulgoleth translates into the Latin, Calvaria, from Calva which means skull. This is where the English term Calvary came from.

The church is “owned” through a complicated shared agreement between the Greek Orthodox, Franciscan Order of Catholics, Armenians, Copts, Ethiopians, and Syrians. The latter three have the least say in the day to day running of the church but their presence is still felt. Each of these orders have chapels and sacred areas in the church, adding to the mixed up feeling of the design.

Inside the church are the final stops or stations of the Via Dolorosa, the last walk of Christ as he carried the cross to his death. The stations are marked through the old city from the church to the start at the Lion’s Gate or Gate of St. Stephen on the east side of the old city. There are small chapels and fairly clear identifying markers at each significant point such as the Fifth Station where Simon the Cyrenian took the cross from Christ to carry it and the Sixth Station where a woman wiped the sweat and blood from Christ’s face, and so on.

As the newer part of the old city was built over the route, who knows where the actual spots really are but the ancient tourism directors of the city, with the help of Queen Helena, clearly marked out this path that once wove through the rocky hillside. In case you aren’t familiar with how this all came to be, no one knew the exact spots for anything that had to do with Christ because most people at the time thought he was a common criminal. Even the descriptions of some of the actual places are fairly vague as written by Paul and the other apostles.

Three hundred years after Christ’s death, and after many uprisings and down-troddings, King Constantine sent his mother, Helena, to Israel to locate the holy spots. She came during intense heat and drought, suffering from the horrible elements, and wandered the countryside claiming that God told her where the spot for this and that was and marking it. Churches and shrines were built over each spot, as best as they could be, as markers do move during time and construction.

Since then, with more uprisings and down-troddings, many of these were destroyed and forgotten only to be “found” and rebuilt again, so who knows where what happened. Brent and I, cynics about the whole identification of THE SPOT process, explore each of the three different spots where Jesus supposedly did this or that, each with a church over the spot and the spot located in the basement of the church (Brent whines, “If I see one more church basement….”), we just agree that any spot is a good enough spot and being close is just fine. Just pick a spot and call it “the spot” and we can pause and give honor to what happened, even if the spot is now under 12 feet of stone and concrete and about 50 feet away from where we are.

There is much in the old city that I love. The Western Wall only impresses me with the people attracted to it. It is not the wall of the temple as many think but the surviving wall that surrounded the temple grounds.

The mosque of El-Aska now stands over the ruins of the Second Temple, and people call the Western Wall the Wailing Wall as they mourn over the destruction of the Temple. I think some of that moaning and groaning is the Jews’ failure to hold on to their property rights. After the destruction, many of the Jews either converted or were exiled. Those few who remained weren’t allowed to walk over the remains of the temple land as the temple was originally built on the mountain “spot” where Abraham was ready to sacrifice his only son to God and where the Lord appeared to David and where Solomon built the first Temple because of these events. It is said that the original First Temple had these sacred spots deep inside of it, only accessible by the highest priests. No Jew is supposed to ever step on that spot. Rebuilt 70 years after its destruction, the Second Temple lasted until Herod rebuilt it almost 500 years later, and that one lasted less than 200 years. After the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans, the Romans built a temple on the spot dedicated to Jupiter, and then later when the Caliph Omar came here bringing his Muslim beliefs in 638, a mosque has stood there and no Jew will walk through the Temple area for fear of “stepping on the spot”. They will visit the courtyard area surrounding where they think the temple stood. After all these centuries, who really knows who thought what and where the real spot is, but the conquerors always rewrite history.

The Jews may wail at the wall, but they lost their property through many wars and abandonments. When Israel won the land and the west side of Jerusalem in the 1948 War of Independence, the Arabs (Jordan) prevented Jews from entering the Old City to visit the Wailing Wall. When they won the land in the 1967 Six Day War, Jews rushed into the Old City to the Western Wall, thrilled to be able to touch and pray at it after being prevented for 20 years. Unfortunately, Jordanian snipers were ready for them and shot the Israeli soliders down as they raced to touch the wall that represented so much to them.

Israel claimed the land the mosque sits on when they won the old city, so if the mosque ever is gone, by war or earthquake or other natural disaster, the land under it is theirs to dig through or whatever. There are tunnels leading to some of the ruins under there that I’ve yet to see. This winter when the temperatures drop and the tourists go home Brent and I will go exploring there.

With Bruce and Wes, we took the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel (SPNI) tour of the old city of Jerusalem and I learned so much. It was amazing and wonderful. We learned that during the Six Day War, in retaliation for being forced out of the old city, the Jordanians blew up much of the Jewish Quarter, leveling it to the ground. As Israeli archeologists moved in, as is required by Israel law, to check it out before rebuilding, what they found wasn’t a surprise to them but it still stunned the world.

Layer upon layer of ancient ruins uncovered because of the last act of war. The challenge was to decide what had to be destroyed in order to discover what lie below, going down through time in the ground. Much from the First Temple time period, 960 BCE to 587 BCE, was just lost to time and depth as well as the decision to protect what was found from the Second Temple period, 520 BCE to 70 CE (AD). How did they decide what to keep and what to destroy to get down to the deeper layers? Wow.

A museum to the First Temple period was constructed over part of the ruins to preserve what they found at the deepest points and that was a highlight of the tour. Deep down we went, exploring the ruins of a First Temple home, probably of a rich person, or the priests, with their bathtub carved into the stone and some pottery and jewelry remains. One “multimedia” exhibit showed the city today with projections of what it used to look like during the First Temple period. It really helped me to understand what it once looked like, something hard to fathom when looking at the city now.

Tel Aviv, Israel

When I think of people taking a test that qualifies them as an official speaker of English as a second language (or third, fourth, or sixteenth for that matter), I have an idea of what the test should be like. The person should be tested on their ability to function within society using English when paying bills, getting a job, and learning how to talk shopping. There are other parts to English, like polite manners and visiting doctors and such, but I think that if someone can carry on a fairly simple conversation and get around town and find what they need to survive, they are doing great with the language. Not so according to my first introduction to the TOEFL test.

Alex, one of my English students, has asked me to help him prepare for the TOEFL test, required to qualify for proficiency in the English language and in order to get jobs in English speaking countries. With an estimate of one in four people on the planet speaking English, this “Test of English as a First Language” is supposed to verify their English skills, which I find ironic because it should be a test to see if they can speak English well enough to pass a test not necessarily sound like a native speaker of English. Have you listened to native English speakers lately? I can hardly understand them, let alone non-native speakers. Determined to help Alex prepare, I found a web site which features instructions, examples, and tips on how to pass the test. The first test question I read was:

Okay, so this is a common phrase and you would hope that the speaker would understand that “me, too” means “I got the same thing” and that “kind of” means “a little”. This makes sense, but then I got to question number two.

Wrong side of the bed? They offer answers like the woman is wrong, his side hurts, he is in a bad mood, and his bed is in poor condition. Well, which one is it? For someone not familiar with this colloquial phrase, it could mean literally that he slept poorly and the bed was bad and now his side hurts and if the woman keeps asking if she did something wrong, well, she might just have! What a question!

Then came question number three:

What? That Jane’s clothes aren’t unraveling? Sure, we who have spent most of our lives with the stupid things English speakers say understand that Jane’s dress isn’t falling off, though some might like that. It means that the women doesn’t think Jane is crazy – or that Jane isn’t off her rocker…now what the hell does that mean? Off her rocker? Oh, that means crazy as a loon. Wait a minute. What does a bird have to do with being a basket case? Or maybe Jane is nuts? And what do nuts in baskets have to do with the looney bin? Oh, I’m on a roll, can’t you tell?

I was rather dismayed at the challenge of trying to help Alex pass the TOEFL test if it means that he not only must understand all the names we have for all the ways we use words like nouns, verbs, objects, subjects, prepositions, as well as clauses, imperatives, verb modals, and other jargon we forgot two minutes after leaving the high school class room, but he must learn all the idiot things we say without ever understanding what we are really saying.

I decided that some of the idiot things Americans (and a few of the English) say would be worthwhile to learn. At least they would be fun to teach, translate, and figure out. As Alex is a doctor-turned-house-cleaner-slash-janitor, one of the first idioms I taught him was “kick the bucket.” He knew “kick” and “bucket”. And he understood “kick the bucket” as knocking a bucket over with your foot and spilling water all over the floor. That made sense. Until I told him that it really meant “dead”.

“Dead?”

“Yep, Alex, it means dead. Dead as a door nail.”

“What’s this?”

I explained that dead as a door nail (after explaining what a door nail was – do you know?) meant “really dead.”

“How can you be really dead? You dead or not dead.”

Well, Alex, let me introduce you to the idiocy of the English language. We happen to have a lot of different words and phrases that explain how “dead” someone really is. Kicked the bucket means fairly recently dead. Dead as a door nail is seriously dead, like stone, cold dead. Then we have variations on the theme of how long someone is deceased and we color our language with death phrases such as pushing up daisies, six feet under, passed on, passed away, extinguished, terminated, out the door, gone forever, dropped dead, kicked over, keeled over, died with his boots on, bought the farm, shoved off this immortal coil…

No wonder it’s so hard to learn our language. Honest to Pete, I’m not pulling your leg, this here funkified lingo is plum screwy. But as they say, if God gives you lemons, make lemonade, so there must be light at the end of the tunnel and a silver lining in that dark cloud. What, having a cow over the English language? Don’t worry, be happy. At least it’s not the end of the world. Besides, I’m sure you are cracking up right now over this silliness. And I’ll be a monkey’s uncle.

You must realize, of course, these sayings are just a drop in the proverbial bucket. And here I am trying to teach English to a couple of students when this TOEFL Preparation Test forces me to include all these ridiculous sayings?

The English “English” roll their eyes when it comes to Americanisms of “their” language. How quickly they forget that much of their “lingo” comes from when England controlled much of France (not to mention most of the rest of the world including much of what became the USA) and that this French influence has contributed to much that is truly messed up in the English language including such profundities as “chateaux”, “through”, “rough”, and “phlegm”. In one of comedian Bill Cosby’s famous bits, he expounds on how Americans think Europeans are so much more intelligent than us because they speak two, three, maybe 14 different languages. He challenges their intelligence, and comprehension of the English language with an invitation to talk “Bah-stahn” or “Nu Yark”, along with a trip to the South. “Let’s see how they do talking so’thern! ‘Yo awl cahm en ohvr hear – ya, hear?’ ‘Pardon, me. Are you speaking to me, sir?’ ‘Yeah, yous. Yous awl cahm he-ar. Rah-eight nah-woo.’ “

Ah, but then there was Eubonics. Need I say more when it comes to the messed up American version of the English language?

Next time you consider how bad you got it, think about those who risk their lives and brains to learn this idiot language so they can keep up with the Jones in the corporate world. I thought Hebrew was bad.

I was going through some homework with Alex and he got three things wrong in the same sentence. I laughed, “Hey, three strikes and your out.”

He got that look on his face that speaks louder than I can. “Yep,” it says, “Lorelle is speaking in tongues.” A few months before I had introduced Alex to “Whose on First” by Abbot and Costello. Spoken in short simple sentences, it was a great practice for synonyms and the crazy use of the English language. Here’s a reminder:

LOU: I love baseball. When we get to St. Louis, will you tell me the guys’ name on the team so when I go to see them in that St. Louis ball park I’ll be able to know those fellows?

BUD: All right, but you know, strange as it may seems, they give ball players nowadays very peculiar names, nick names, like “Dizzy Dean.” Now on the St. Louis team we have Whose on first, Whats on second, Idontknow is on third –

LOU: That’s what I want to find out. I want you to tell me the names of the fellows on the St. Louis team.

BUD: I’m telling you. Who’s on first, What’s on second, Idontknow is on third —

LOU: You know the fellows’ names?

BUD: Yes.

LOU: Well, then whose playin’ first.

BUD: Yes.

LOU: I mean the fellow’s name on first base.

BUD: Who.

LOU: The fellow playin’ first base for St. Louis.
BUD: Who.

LOU: The guy on first base.

BUD: Who is on first.

LOU: Well, what are you askin’ me for?

BUD: I’m not asking you — I’m telling you. WHO’S ON FIRST.

LOU: I’m asking you — who’s on first?

BUD: That’s the man’s name!

LOU: That’s whose name?

BUD: Yes.

Alex, a major Russian sports nut, had only seen baseball in movies. He knew nothing about the game. So I got out pen and paper and drew a baseball diamond, marked in the shortstop and outfield, and named all the players and their responsibilities, dredging up ancient baseball trivia from the dusty attic of my brain. Girls weren’t allowed to play in Little League when I was young, but my father was a coach so I became the “bat girl” hitting balls out to the boys to practice catching and playing with them during the practice games. I was a vicious baseball player. Loved it with a passion. After spending hours in classes then fairly strict ballet and dance classes, this was a chance to run around outside and get all dirty. When we moved to Mukilteo, Washington, from the Lake Stevens countryside, my new school only allowed girls to play a form of baseball I was unfamiliar with called “softball.” My first time up to bat, I was rather shocked to see a ball the size of a cantaloupe coming at me. I swung with all my might (I had broken my share of wooden bats) and the bat connected with a thunk that jarred my arms all the way up to the top of my head and right down to my toes. I felt like my elbows had just turned inside out and my stomach came right up to my mouth with the pain. In slow motion I opened my eyes from the resounding shock to see the cantaloupe-sized ball drop to the ground not a meter in front of me, rolling off to the side and out of bounds. I only played a few more games after that, furious at the stupidity of softball. Why should girls have to play with the big balls and boys with the small? It’s pretty darn hard to smack a softball out of the park? There just isn’t the same joy of seeing that ball sail right out over the fence, making you the hero!

The memories of how to stand at the plate and hold the bat, how to make those great double plays, all came rolling back into my head after a 25 year absence and I started to teach Alex about baseball, at least on paper.

Explaining “three strikes” meant explaining the present day reference: The Three Strikes Law. The US legal system created a “three strikes and you’re out” law that states if you commit two violent crimes, you will be punished accordingly, but three crimes and you are in jail for good. It is believed that the fear of the “three strikes” law would help to reform criminals. I don’t know if it has or not, but I do know the criminal system as it works now doesn’t work well, so what is one more effort to improve it?

Brent and I got talking about all of these funny baseball saying and he reminded me of the most famous usage of baseball: SEX. How could I have forgotten that! To help Alex understand, I put together an example of how teenage boys talk about sex using the secret code of baseball language.

Boy 1: So how was your date last night with Sally? Did you get to first base?
Boy 2: Yeah, but I struck out at second. How was it with Alice?
Boy 1: Oh, boy, I got all the way to third base before I struck out.
Boy 2: Third base! Do you think you’ll go all the way next time?
Boy 1: I can’t wait to step up to the plate cuz I’m going to score a home run! It’s going to be a fly ball outta the park!

For those unfamiliar with baseball lingo, first base is kissing and trying to touch. Second base is touching outside of the clothes. Third base is touching under the clothes. A home run, or going all the way, is what you think it is. Now, some may debate with me that second base is under the clothes and third base is without clothes but not going all the way, but that’s a detail. When I explained this to Alex, he about fell on the floor with at the silliness of the Americans, while blushing for the silliness of the topic under discussion.

Teaching What Others Won’t

Tutoring English here in Israel, there are a lot of topics I will cover that most teachers won’t. It is a part of speaking the language to know what everything is called and how people refer to it. I’m sorry but sex and swearing are just part of the language. After all, it is the number one export coming out of the good ole prudish USA. While Alex doesn’t use swear words in English, or in Russian for that matter, he wanted to know what the f-word meant. It is in all the movies and all the kids in Russia use it without understanding what it really means. Alex figured it wasn’t a good word. I gave him the basic definition and then explained the various definitions of the f-word. It is one of the few words in the English language that is a noun, verb, adjective, and adverb, and probably a few others. Sure enough, I came up with the sentence: “That motherf-ing f-ker f-ing f-ed my f-ing f-er.” Whew! A word for that will work for everything. When you think about it from this perspective, you understand how the people lacking much intelligence use it to replace whatever word they can’t think of because it fills in all the blanks.

The incorporation of English swear words (or from whatever language they originally came from) into other languages amazes me. According to my Russian friends here, the f-word and shit are now used all over Russia, and everywhere else. Whether they are used correctly or not is another matter. Here in Israel, de-fook (very close pronunciation to our f-word) means screwed up and messed up, and a little crazy. A friend asked me how that translated into English. I told them it meant what it sounded like, “f-ed up”. He asked if it was only “up” or could you be “f-ed down”? No, I explained through hysterical tears, only up. He didn’t understand why there were such limits. Maybe I don’t either, but I never thought to ask.

As I tutor in this f-ed up language called English, Alex and Anna are determined to learn only the “American English” not the England English. I personally love an English accent and am one of the millions of Americans who believe than someone with an English accent must be more intelligent than I and most of my friends. Not true, but they SOUND so intelligent. Most foreigners, though, want to learn American English. This includes not only the accent and pronunciation of words US-style, but learning the cliches and terms unique to American English. According to Frank McCourt in his best-selling sequel to Angela’s Ashes, ‘Tis, he explains:

In America a torch is called a flashlight. A biscuit is called a cookie, a bun is a roll. Confectionery is pastry and minced meat is ground. Mean wear pants instead of trousers and they’ll even say this pant leg is shorter than the other which is silly. When I hear them saying pant leg I feel like breathing faster. The lift is an elevator and if you want a W.C. or a lavatory you have to say bathroom even if there isn’t a sign of a bath there. And no one dies in America, they pass away or they’re deceased and when they die the body, which is called the remains, is taken to a funeral home where people just stand around and look at it and no one sings or tells a story or takes a drink and then it’s taken away in a casket to be interred. They don’t like saying coffin and they don’t like saying buried. They never say graveyard. Cemetery sounds nicer.”

So I teach baseball lingo and explain which words are acceptable and which are not, and Alex and his wife breath in the language with a fierceness that is amazing, determined to enter the world of English and eventually immigrate to Canada. I wish I had such a passion for something like they do.

Tel Aviv, Israel

It is now 16 months after the riots at the Al-Aska Mosque near the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, believed to be initiated by Arial Sharon’s visit to the Mosque. It is almost exactly one year since Prime Minister Ehud Barak was voted out of office in an emergency election. Members of the Israel Government and the public protested his lack of “strength” against the Palestinian Authority, believing him unable to control the violence. They also believe Barak was going to give away too much to keep the peace. His replacement, Arial Sharon, a former army commander and symbol of murder and hatred for the Palestinians, has been in office a year and nothing much has changed. I sit here listening to the news, the violence escalating by leaps and bounds and I wonder about all I knew before, and how much I have learned since.

It is clear now that what many believed was an instantaneous expression of anger to Sharon’s visit was an organized act, carefully scripted. Israel continues to claim that Arafat is the guiding force behind the violence, that he permits the attacks, suicide bombers, and escalation to continue. Arafat, now restrained from his jet-setting around the world from leader to leader, is now forced to spend time with his people under a lock down by the Israelis. He cries out that he is putting out 100% effort to stop the violence but the Israelis have tied his hands by keeping him in one place. The math doesn’t add up for me as 100% effort means visible results must be felt. Maybe for Arafat 100% efforts means “I did the best I could, what else can I do.” It adds up to “not much”. If Israel is really “tying his hands” then he can’t give 100%, so why is he saying that? Again, I see talk without evidence of action. He appears to comply with Israel’s demands by arresting terrorist leaders, but a few days after the media’s interest dies down, he releases them. Why bother?

Prime Minister Sharon has his hands tied as well. While Arafat works through his dictatorship-disguised-as-a-semi-democracy, Sharon works within a socialistic/parliamentary style democracy bound by the game playing of his multi-party government. Every special interest group and government party want Sharon to do this and that and not do this and that. Some want him to crush the Palestinians to the ground, pushing them back to the other Arab countries or forcing them to “be a part of Israel or shut up”. Others want to just put a wall around the Palestinian areas and force them to declare themselves a state and learn to live independent from Israel and the other Arab countries on their own, just as Israel was forced to do. There are others, a minority now, who want to keep talking, to find a way to make peace, but their voices are often drowned out by the screams of ultimatums. Bound by his government, Sharon is also hog-tied by the international forces which either support openly or covertly Israel. While it seems the US is the major controlling influence, Sharon must also bear the reprisals and influence of the European Union, Russia, Britain, and many other countries. As a legitimate country, Israel must work within the treaties and agreements which link it with the rest of the world through trade and industry, as well as humanitarian and military efforts a responsible country shares with its neighbors and partners. Let’s not forget that even while battling this current Palestinian uprising, Israel has been among the first in line around the world with supplies, tools, and rescue services for earthquake, flood, and other victims around the world. Their efforts are done quietly, often completely out of the public eye, but they are done. These are the responsibilities of running a country as part of the global economy, something Arafat keeps his people from participating in.

Who is right and who is wrong? Does it matter any more? What matters is probably that there are too many chefs trying to make the soup on both sides. What I do know for sure is that our perception about the violence has changed dramatically.

As we came to accept the constant inflow of bad news, our attitudes and behaviors changed. At first, news of a suicide bombing would send me running home in a panic, plastering my soul upon the television absorbing the heartache, misery, and horrors. Brent and I would call each other with minute by minute accounts of what we knew, he from the Hebrew sources as he became more fluent, and me from CNN and BBC. Slowly, it changed to a comment during dinner as we discussed the day. Then it became a mention of “Did you hear the news?” “Yeah.” And the conversation would end. Life went on, day after day, untouched by the “reality” shown on television. My mother was the first to visit us here. I didn’t worry much about keeping the fear level down with her as she is accustomed to a variety of situations and adapts fairly quickly. She was reassured that the vision of Israel she sees on television in no way reflects the reality of life here. Hot spots will be hot spots, and if you learn to avoid them, they don’t seem to touch you. Sort of.

Two other friends spent a couple weeks with us just after my mother left, and then we had the heat of the summer to ourselves, the attacks coming and going like waves on the ocean, sometimes still, sometimes pounding. In the fall, as the summer heat left and people started to move around more, the violence grew again. Then came September 11 and the world tilted on its axis. Then came the attacks on Afghanistan, and Brent’s parents went against the tide of the media and friends and family to visit us in Israel in November, a year after the Intifada began. Having never been overseas, we worried about their responses to the different lifestyles as well as the threat of violence that we live with every day.

I took care to keep the television turned off and the news from them as best as I could. Yet, when we went near some of the hot spots, we had to talk about it. Using the techniques I’ve mentioned, we calmly and matter-of-factly discussed the “what ifs”. What if there is a police warning about a bomb? How will they know since they can’t speak the language? What should they do? What should we do if separated? Where should we go? We problem-solved all of the “what ifs” and made plans. In Jerusalem, the anxiety was a little higher, but they just accepted that this was the way life was here, and this is just how you have to live your life. They quickly got used to the purse and bag checks at all the main shops and malls, and the omnipresent flashing lights of the security and police forces. When we walked past a brand new memorial for the teenagers lost in the bombing of the Dolphinarium Disco in Tel Aviv, they honored it like it was part of history and not just something that happened a few weeks before. Just the cost of creating a new country and maintaining peace, I guess they thought.

Personally, I have a hard time understanding anyone who believes violence is an answer. I’ve lost a lot of respect all around for those who choose the easy way out through violence instead of putting all their energies into coming up with a peaceful end to the conflict. The concept that “talk is cheap, I want to see action” implies that action will never come from talking. Is this backwards thinking?

Two things happened that made me realize how desensitized I had become to the violence around us. My father and I were both fairly sick with the flu just before Christmas. He had arrived a week before for a month long visit and was trying to find his feet on his first trip far from home. We were watching television when a big booming explosion rattled the windows. I calmly looked at him and explained, “That’s what a suicide bomber sounds like.”

He just sat there, unable to do much more than take it in. A few seconds later, another exploding sound shook the cement apartment. “That is NOT what a suicide bomber sounds like,” I laughed weakly.

“Those are sonic booms,” my father wanted to believe. I agreed and told him we would call them sonic booms if it made us feel better. The need to rush to the phone or television to see what was happening wasn’t there any more. I told him that we would finish watching this program and in a half hour or so there would be news. Too sick to fuss over it, he went along with me. We found out later that the Israel Air Force was chastised for flying too low over Tel Aviv and that thousands of calls reporting a bombing were made to the police, but it really was the jets.

The second stunning discovery of our acceptance of the whole situation was a month later while having my hair cut. The phone rang in the salon and someone informed the staff that a bomb had gone on in Tel Aviv in the Old Central Bus Station, a scene of many past such occurrences. They turned on the news in Hebrew and went back to cutting hair. I sat quietly and waited until enough news was on and then asked them to fill me in. “Maybe two dead and over 30 wounded at the station.” That was enough. I calmly finished my hair cut and then continued with my shopping before returning home and calling Brent to give him the news. No panic. No racing home. Just another bombing.

To live in a place where I can even think “just another bombing” or “just another attack” is amazing. And to live here and feel such complacency – it is an outrage to my senses. Yet, to live otherwise would make me physically sick and mentally ill. Acceptance, a sense of inevitability, and mindless desensitization is how humans cope with the horrors created around them by other humans. Yet, I still care, but I am so frustrated trusting others who should know better to stop the violence. I think crazy thoughts some times about all of this, including the strange thought that humans, as a species, created this instinct to kill each other out of some weird population control mechanism, like lemmings racing into the sea when their population is out of control. Killing is just instinct, not sense.

But it is sense when it comes to killing here. It is carefully thought out and planned on both sides. Suicide bombers just don’t freak out and grab some explosives and blow themselves up. They plan, researching and studying spots that can bring the most violence and do the most damage to people. Rarely do they blow up buildings, but specialize in killing people. They practice and train for the event. They video tape themselves proudly displaying their explosives and bragging about what they are about to do. They sneak into the country through extraordinary means to get past the tight security and then coordinate their horror when they can do the most damage and still be in time to get on the evening news world wide. Israel plans and strategies against the Palestinians as to where they can hit with the most force and do the least damage, taking out buildings and not people whenever possible in what they call “tweezer strikes”. There is a long held belief that the only thing Arabs respect is force, so Israel makes big “forceful” moves while the world condemns Israel for out of proportion air strikes against rock throwing peasants and children. Israel has worked hard to protect the Arabs living within its borders, though fear and unease makes it difficult for both sides from time to time. So when an Israeli/Arab strikes from within, old fears rise up, making some believe that all Arabs should not be trusted, even those from within.

Growing up in the United States, I witnessed the rise in random violence. Even today, children are shooting other children not just in their homes or streets but inside of the schools. Drive-by shootings are now fairly common place as gangs take over different parts of a town. The gangsters who survived have grown up to see the uselessness of their actions. Many are now working to change the system, but violence is still an accepted part of everyday life in the United States. Morals and a high value system seems to have eroded throughout the country. Is living with this kind of random violence any different than living with planned and orchestrated violence?

From an American perspective, the same way I grew to accept the outrages of violence against non-hostile people within my own country is the same way I have grown to accept the outrages of violence between hostile people here in Israel. Yet in Israel, people feel free to walk about any time of the day or night without fear of risk of live. They think nothing of letting their teenagers go out after ten at night to meet with friends somewhere. There is no fear of the darkness or of strange places and unknown neighborhoods. Their fears come from a neighboring country, not so much from within. It is so strange to feel this sense of safety to wander around without fear of rape, attack, or death at the hand of a stranger, and yet know that any moment I may be in the right place and right time to be torn apart by a carefully planned suicide bomber. Strange thoughts that come with learning to live under siege.

Tel Aviv, Israel

The summer of 2000 was filled with news about the peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians. With the help of the United States, Egypt, and even the United Nations, it looked like peace would finally come to these two peoples. Unfortunately, the two sides were unable to reach an agreement, and the Palestinians grew frustrated and restless. When an Israeli government official, Ariel Sharon, took a huge group of military officers and Israeli officials to “march” on the site of the Temple Mount and El-Aqsa Mosque, holy to the three largest religions in the world, angry Muslim worshipers began throwing rocks at Sharon and his entourage. Within days Palestinians were rioting, throwing rocks, and inciting violence around the country, though mostly focused within their territories and along border areas.

The feeling of living under siege actually started for me a few months before the violence erupted in the Middle East. I got up early, as usual, to workout and I turned on the news to see an interesting perspective of my home town. There was an overhead view of Fourth Avenue in downtown Seattle with a military tank rolling down the center. I called my mother immediately.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. What’s wrong?”

“There are tanks driving down Fourth Avenue. What’s going on?”

“I don’t know. Probably something to do with the WTO.”

Downtown Seattle spent several days under siege from rioters and violence during the World Trade Organization conference. The pictures of rioters rolling cars, setting things on fire, and breaking windows was front page news internationally. For me, living thousands of miles away in Israel, it was terrifying. For my mother, living 40 miles away, it was a nothing event. Generally inconvenient, and a bit worrisome. Now, as I live “under siege” in Israel, my mother calls me from Seattle begging me to come home after every report of a riot or bombing. After the bombing of a public bus I get a call. “Don’t ride any buses now!” “Yes, Mother.” After the riots at the Temple Mount in the old city of Jerusalem, the call is: “Don’t go to Jerusalem!” “Yes, Mother.” After the bombing of a night club on the waterfront, I hear the telephone instructions: “Don’t you dare go out at night!” “Yes, Mother.” Just as the tanks rolling down a main street in Seattle are “far” from my mother in Seattle, these events seem far from me and our life here in Israel.

How does one cope with living “under siege”? For many, living under siege is a real and threatening position with bullets flying and bombs dropping. For the two of us in Israel, it is more psychological than physical. There are no bullets flying in downtown Tel Aviv, yet they are flying in a few areas along borders within the Palestinian Authority. Terrorist acts are a part of everyday life here in Israel and the people have spent decades living with the fear, programming their life around the possibilities of such attacks. The unknown “when” causes preventative actions and precautions to be put into every day practice. So you learn to live “under siege”.

I have long lived with the concept that rehearsal in life is a good thing. When preparing for a meeting, a confrontation, or some action in your life, it helps to go through the process in your mind and prepare yourself to handle the different challenges and outcomes that can arise from that action. As a child I was trained what to do in case of a fire or earthquake. As I grew older, I was trained in first aid and emergency response and actions, as well as CPR procedures. Once I understood how I would respond in an emergency, and had practiced a few times, I knew I could handle the reality. The fear around the “possibility” of an emergency happening was reduced, relieving my anxiety and stress. I applied the same techniques to living under siege.

As soon as it was obvious from watching the news and talking to friends here in Israel that the riots and violence were not going to abate soon, Brent and I sat down and made plans. We talked them all through, problem solving as we went, examining all the “what ifs”.

What if there is a bomb, violence, or closure of the highway preventing Brent from coming home or endangering him? What should he do? What if something happens close to home where I have my home office? What should I do? How should I respond? What if I’m out on the street somewhere? How will we let each other know we are okay? What if we must leave an area for our own safety? Where would we go so we can find each other later? What if we have to leave the country in a hurry? What if we have to leave the country separately? How would we get out? How would we find each other later? What about money? What about food? What about bomb shelters? The mind jumps and leaps to find all the “what ifs” and fears. Bringing them into the light seemed to frightened us more. The list kept growing and growing until we felt totally out of control and consumed by our fears.

We started examining them one by one. The best way to create a safety plan is to make it simple, easy to remember, and applicable to a variety of situations. We broke it down into simple steps and looked for similarity in the events. We needed to plan for help, escape, communication, and survival in each case.

First, we called the most “resourceful” people we knew in Israel and asked them if they were willing to help us if we needed it. We put their phone numbers on a laminated card to carry in our wallets. We also asked friends who live just out of the city if we could come stay with them in case an emergency drove us out of the city. They agreed. Their address went onto a card with other critical contact information that we could carry in our pockets. This card would allow us to have the contact information handy in case we were too stressed to recall names and phone numbers. Second, we agreed that Brent’s parents and their family business would be our main contact number in the United States. Third, we got a free Hotmail email account which is accessible from any computer hooked to the Internet from anywhere in the world. We could leave messages there for each other in case of separation or emergency.

Fourth, we decided that if we were separated and forced out of the city or from the country, as soon as we were in a location to stay for at least three days, we would go to a major hotel and make a purchase, if not rent a room, with our credit card. Credit card purchases through a major hotel usually are posted within a few hours with the credit card company, unlike smaller hotels which might take a day or two to post the purchase. We would call the credit card company to check for any charge to a hotel and then call that hotel. A message would be waiting at the front desk regarding where we were staying and the condition we were in. Our credit card company gave us some other tips on tracking each other down through our purchases and how they could help us in an emergency with translators, travel arrangements, and emergency funds, which also gave us another resource for help.

Now that we had the communication and help resources figured out, we looked at the specifics. Brent spends most of his time at work or in the car. There are all kinds of emergency procedures at work, so Brent was reliant upon those for his protection there. But in his car, we had to plan for his survival, escape, and communication in case something happened while driving to or from work. Communication was easy as the car rental company provided us with a cell phone for use with the car.

We put canned and dried food in the trunk with water and a blanket for survival in case Brent was trapped with the car for any length of time. We also considered how he could “hide” in the car if necessary. In this specific car, a four door sedan, one of the back seats dropped down to “expand” the trunk, giving Brent access to actually crawl into the trunk and pull the seat closed behind him, hiding him in the trunk. With his height, it would be a tight squeeze, but for survival, you do what you have to.

We talked about routes to and from home and alternative paths, working them out on the maps and actually traveling them to make sure we were familiar with them. We covered the route to get to our friend’s home, too, checking alternative routes. We looked at the map and discussed various public places like malls and schools where he could go for safety and help in case he was stopped or unable to get through.

We also talked about responding to different stimuli and how we would make decisions based on the stimulus. For instance, what to do if we hear gunfire, see a group of emergency vehicles, or hear an explosion. Do we duck and stay put, or run for cover? Or do we get a closer look to get more information? We both decided that avoidance is the best choice, so duck and run for cover and get out of the way was the best answer in most of the situations.

From home, we checked out the bomb shelter locations around us. It is a requirement that all buildings, and new apartments, must have a bomb shelter. New apartments have a room dedicated as the bomb shelter with heavy sealable doors and windows with heavy metal shutters as well as strong cabinets for food and water storage. Older buildings, like ours, are built with bomb shelters in the basements, and there are several in the neighborhood at the nearby art museum, city library and concert hall. So if we are out in the neighborhood, we knew where the shelters were.

We put together a suitcase with some food provisions, money, and clothing for at least three days and set it by the door to quickly grab if we needed to leave the country. We made a point of carrying all of our personal legal documents with us no matter where we went, including our passports. We also carried two different credit cards each, putting each one in a different spot on our body. For instance, I carried one in my wallet with some money, and then the other with more money in a pocket, keeping it separate from my wallet and purse. We also put together a medium-sized, soft-sided ice chest stocked with water and canned and dried food and a few plates, cups and silverware, and a small blanket, and set that by the door to grab in case we had to evacuate to the bomb shelter. The cat’s carrier bag with food provisions for him also went near the door.

We talked about all the what ifs, and the plans and procedures we would use, for hours, then days. After a while, we were sick of talking about it, but we both knew what the other would do. We tested each other to build a trust in our actions, abilities, and each other. We grew comfortable with the tension of the “what ifs”. We had our plans. Now it was time for the waiting.

The first three months have been filled with sounds of the television and/or radio on at least 18 hours a day. Limited to only 30 minutes once a day of English news on the local television channel, we were reliant upon international news from CNN, BBC, and Sky News, as well as that from friends who translated the events from Hebrew for us. I can’t sit still for very long, so I worked on a quilt I had designed almost a year before, just after arriving in Israel. This passed the time for me while staring at the television watching the live reports from the Palestinian “Front Lines”, just waiting for it to come closer to us in Tel Aviv. The quilt was based on a traditional quilt block called “Storm at Sea” and a year ago I named the quilt, “Israel Storm”. It wasn’t until the third week of my sewing and watching the “war” on television that I realized the significance of the name. Thus the quilt, “Israel Storm”, grew to have a greater significance. It now hangs on the wall of the apartment over the dining table, a symbol of beauty created during a true storm of rocks, sniper fire, and bombs through my CNN window to the world.

Those first three months of the Palestinian Intifada (uprising), Brent and I felt like we were walking around with our shoulders up around our ears with tension. I kept exercising early in the morning, walking to the beach and swimming in the sea, until the waters finally got too cold and the waves too high from winter storms. So I walked the streets of Tel Aviv early in the morning, exploring the less ” commercial” areas of the city away from likely targets like shopping malls or government offices, trying to read the minds of the terrorists. Where would they strike next?

I tried keeping up with friends and family about our situation, reassuring them that we were “far” from the danger and just fine. But a new word entered the lexicon: cyber terrorists. It began with Israel defacing a few Arab web sites, then the Arabs responded with venom and struck back with tricks to lock up Israeli web sites and Internet servers, defacing web pages and issuing viruses. Within two months I had three viruses. I don’t know how I got them even to this date, and two remained undetected by my virus program for a few weeks playing havoc with my machine, and causing me no end of frustration as I tried to figure out if it was a virus or my machine that was the problem. After almost 20 years of serious computer usage, these were my first viruses. Welcome to modern terrorism.

Cyber terrorists locked up the web sites and networks of several of the largest Internet services in Israel, as well as most of the government networks and sites. Once I was on the Internet, I couldn’t seem to get access to the Ministry’s web site handling the press releases or any of the Israeli online English newspapers. I finally found information from the Israel Embassy in England, and their web site offered up-to-the-minute news from various news wires around the world and in Israel on what was happening here. But access to the Internet was hit and miss as the servers kept crashing or locking up from the work of the cyber terrorists as well as the thousands of people flooding the Internet to find out what was going on.

So we weren’t really unaffected by the violence. Not only was our Internet and email access severely restricted, we had several friends and family members cancel their trips to visit us. It is really hard to argue with graphic images of a father trying to protect his son from a barrage of gun fire which eventually kills his son, or images of soldiers firing machine guns at what looks like children throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails at them. The international news rarely showed Palestinian snipers shooting at Israeli soldiers from nearby buildings. The children, dirty and ragged in worn out clothing, heaving their whole bodies into the rock throwing, makes for better television viewing. And it is hard to overlook images of school buses blown up along the highway and Jewish children losing arms and legs as surgeons battle to save their lives. The pictures of war and violence turn the stomach and create a fear that goes to the bone. The ugly head of “what if it happens to us” raises up and people think “if we stay away, we’ll be safe.”

In general, it is safer to live in Israel than just about any major city or large community in the United States. In Israel you can go out and walk the streets in relative safety, with no fear of being attacked, mugged, or raped, 24 hours a day. Since just about everyone who lives in Israel over the age of 18 is serving or has served two or more years in the military, they represent a walking military force, ready to take arms and protect their country in an instant. They also take it upon themselves to report anything the least bit suspicious or mysterious. Since the Intifada began in September of 2000, there has been at least one bomb found every other day in Israel. But you don’t hear about it on the news as it is found and dismantled or exploded in a safe way by experts. Most of these are reported by civilians trained to pay attention to details. The major form of injury in Israel comes from car accidents, not bombs or violent crime. In the United States, random violence and violent crime among teenagers is on the rise and nowhere is safe from violence, not even the small communities. Most of the violence you see on television from Israel happens within the Palestinian areas, closed off to Israelis. I will never forget one of the first days when the Palestine/Israel border was closed, Palestinian young men took to the streets breaking into businesses, flipping cars, setting things on fire, and destroying everything in sight right in their own neighborhoods. They were destroying the property of their friends and families – certainly not doing anything to Israel. But it was good for the cameras who recorded every second of the event. What was the point of that? Meanwhile, Israeli citizens, who live away from the border areas, live in relative peace and only stress out when they turn on the television.

I finally learned that lesson. After three months of staring at the television and reliving the blood and gore 10, 20, 30 times a day with repeated newscasts told from every angle and perspective, I turned off the television. The stress started to go away. After a while, I resumed all of my normal activities and even started visiting Jerusalem to explore its old city and historical monuments, taking advantage of the cool weather. We started driving around the country again, enjoying the temperate winter and seeing the sites. Sure, we charted our course to avoid any “hot spots”, but it didn’t keep us from the areas we wanted to visit.

We didn’t totally avoid the news. We watched the evening news, and kept an ear tuned to big events, but we gave up the endless hours glued to the television. I stopped sewing and got busy fixing my computer from the viruses and other problems, and did other things away from the television. Brent’s parents started talking about rescheduling their canceled visit from the previous October to the upcoming October. My mother decided she wanted to visit in March. Then we heard from our best buddy, Bruce, about coming from Kansas with a friend to spend a couple of weeks in April for Easter. We were thrilled, but also surprised. As international television viewers grew weary of the violence from the Middle East, the stations quit offering daily reports. Journalists who flocked here in September and October by the plane load, started going home or moved on to other more sensational stories. For them, it was an old story, and to the rest of the world, the level of violence and the killing had dropped off. Nothing going on, so it must be safer.

In reality, the number of dead is climbing steadily, passing over 600. The terrorist bomb attacks are growing in frequency and intensity. Bombs are going off or are found near major population centers where before they were only found near the border areas or Arab communities. Not only are they found on buses, but a Palestinian bus driver, long trusted by the Israeli bus company, decided to go whacko and rammed his bus into a crowd of young people and soldiers waiting at a bus stop. Nowhere seems really safe. In the large cities, people were staying off public transportation and staying away from malls and large shopping areas. Movie theaters are starting to fill-up, but ever so slowly, as people still avoid crowded areas. The old city of Jerusalem was almost a ghost town, even though few acts of violence actually occurred there. It was a symbol of the growing violence, a place where trouble could start with Jews, Muslims, Christians, and where the Palestinian and Israeli populations live in close proximity. So people avoid it and the merchants close their doors to cut costs. To the outside world it seems more peaceful in Israel because we aren’t front page headlines. So our friends and family come visiting, in spite of the reality.

Life goes on, and so do we. The suitcase is now unpacked and put away. The ice chest is empty, but the former contents are in a box stuffed under the kitchen table – just in case. We still carry our passports, but the separation of the money and carrying the extra credit cards have stopped. We still have the Hotmail email accounts, which are handy as my regular account and computer are still having troubles. We still keep an eye out for nearby bomb shelters, but it is more out of curiosity and habit than concern. But we do keep our time in shopping malls and popular places to a minimum, just in case.

Like our friends and families viewing Israel through CNN-colored glasses, we, too, are starting to take the violence and threat of war in stride, accepting rather than stressing over every bomb or act of violence. Our shoulders have dropped back to their normal comfortable positions, and the headaches and upset stomachs are gone. The danger is there and increasing from time to time, but our stress level is decreasing as we get used to “living under siege”. It only proves that human beings can get used to anything.

Tel Aviv, Israel

Israel Highlights

If you are planning a visit to Israel, according to AAA, the 10 top things to see and do are:

• Visit the Holy Sites: Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nazareth, and the Galilee.
• Visit the Israel Museum to see the exhibits and the famous Dead Sea Scrolls.
• Visit the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, honoring the 6 million dead in the Holocaust.
• Float down the River Jordan, a great way to see the countryside and get baptized accidently.
• Float in the Dead Sea and get yourself covered with the famous black mud.
• Ride on a camel.
• Visit a kibbutz. There are 130,000 people living on the 270 kibbutzim in Israel.
• Shop the Arab bazaars in Jerusalem’s Old City and/or Tel Aviv’s Carmel Market.
• Eat falafel in pita, an inexpensive traditional Arab meal.
• Visit Eilat and the Red Sea, especially enjoying the underwater experience.

We would add a visit to the Golan Heights to see the lovely green mountains and lovely Hulah Valley, a visit to the south through the famous Ramon Crater, a mountain turned inside out by time, and a desert Jeep tour, exploring the magical deserts of Israel. There is much to see and do in Israel and we recommend at least two weeks, three or four would be better. To avoid the incredible heat, visit from late September to April, but be prepared for the occasional drenching rain during that time period. After April, rain won’t visit the area until November.

Sample Itinerary

In anticipation of a visit to Israel by Brent’s parents, we put together this itinerary based upon various recommendations by friends, and from looking at other similar plans. His parents are religious, so we focused on the religious sites, though there are many other exciting ruins and natural wonders worth exploring here in Israel. At the time of their scheduled trip, Bethlehem was closed due to recent violence. It is a fairly short visit from Jerusalem, which should be taken with a tour group, and is included on many tours of the Holy Sites near Jerusalem. Items in italic are quotes from the tour brochures.

We recommend the tours by The Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel, United Tours and Egged Tours and recommend purchasing the following books from either Amazon.com or Steimatsky Books:

• Culture Shock! Israel
• Fodor’s Israel
• Gems in Israel Tours and Information
• Tzofit Guide for Touring Israel
• Jerusalem EasyWalks by Aviva Bar-Am
• EasyWalks in Israel by Aviva Bar-Am
• Also check our Links and Resources about Israel

NOTE: We’ve included links to some of the sites we mention. We do not recommend or endorse these web sites. They are for information only. If you have any problem with the links, please let us know at lorelle@cameraontheroad.com. Enjoy.

VanFossen Productions
VanFossens Golden Tour Schedule
As of July, 2001

Day 1

Arrive at Ben Gurion Airport. Maybe a quick stop at the store and then home to relax and have dinner at the Panorama Restaurant on Tel Aviv waterfront which overlooks the beach of Tel Aviv and the ancient city of Jaffa (Yafo) in the distance. It was from there that Jonah set sail to meet the whale. We’ll walk to the waterfront and maybe along the promenade as we wander back home through the new city of Tel Aviv.

Day 2, Monday

Day for unpacking and resting. If you are up for it, we can spent the morning at the Eretz Museum in Tel Aviv to begin examining the history and life of the country. Either way, we will definitely go grocery shopping at Azrieli/HaShalom Mall. There is nothing like the experience of shopping in Israel for a foreigner, especially an American. It is an “experience” as it can take hours and many of the labels do have English but most are in Hebrew and/or Russian. The large grocery store at the Azrieli Mall is huge for Israeli standards, but we are going for the most entertaining experience in the shortest amount of time. The checking out process is also entertaining as you have to bag it yourself. Ask for “mishlo-ackh” and you will get it delivered to your home for free or a small fee. This is AWESOME and the only good part about grocery shopping in Israel. Mainly this day provides time to restock your physical energy from the 12 to 24 hours of flight time. It is also a great time to catch up and tell old stories.

Day 3, Tuesday

Early morning walk to the waterfront for a swim in the Mediterranean.

Shopping and exploring the markets of Tel Aviv and Carmel Market including the famous Nachalat Binyamin Arts and Crafts Fair held every Tuesday and Friday in Tel Aviv. At these markets and fair you will find all the interesting magic that is the old feeling of Israel. The food and household goods hawkers that line the narrow alley of the Carmel Market shout and yell at the crowd as they squeeze through, waving their cigarettes in the air and begging for buyers. The Arts Fair features handicrafts and artwork done by locals, but representing the artistry of the many immigrants and the crafts of their lands. Here is the place to buy unusual mezuzahs and hanukiah and other traditional Israeli and Jewish symbols done with great style and artistry. This is the place to pick up the most interesting bits and pieces of Israel to take home for yourself or as gifts.

Lunch on the waterfront (picnic) eating Russian, Arab, and Yemenite food.

Walk along some of Tel Aviv’s more interesting streets like King George, Shenkin, and up to Dizengoff Street on the way home to enjoy the interesting shops and stores. These are the more popular “modern” shopping areas of Tel Aviv. You will see people dressed in every fashion statement style for the past 500 years as we walk.

Home to rest and have a wonderful dinner from the goodies purchased at the market.

Day 4, Wednesday

Sea of Galilee, footsteps of Jesus tour with United/Egged Tours

This rapid paced bus tour gives a quick overview of the Tiberias and Kinneret area with stops at the baptismal site of Jesus (according to Israel and many Christians), the site and church of the Multiplication of the Loaves, and possibly a quick stop in Nazareth. This all day trip with United/Egged Tours is a typical tourist adventure, but it does cover a lot of ground and you get a taste of the area.

Home after 7PM for a light dinner and early bed.

Day 5, Thursday

Be prepared for a full day, and for your head to burst with information and history. It is a day covering over 200,000 years of history. Getting up very early in the morning, the first stop is the furthest on the trip in Akko near the Lebanon border. You will explore the ancient underground remains of the Crusader town, learning about some of the history and magic of this fishing city as it was torn down, rebuilt, built over, and how it survives today. Lunch will be within the old wall of the city, eating some of the fish from the sea, then we will drive through the famous port city of Haifa to part of the famous Carmel Caves where over 200,000 years of continual human occupation has been uncovered. We will explore some of the caves and remains and watch an interesting video that takes us back to how life was lived so many thousands of years ago.

Then we will head on to explore the famous ruins of Caesarea, another famous Crusader fortress and city, one that kept the Crusades going for a very long time. Dinner will be on the way home at the popular Yotvota Restaurant, a modern Dennys.

The Crusades

There are some interesting sites on the Internet with detailed information on the Crusades. The BBC-TV also did a lighthearted but thorough documentary about the Crusades recently.

• Online Reference Book for Medieval Studies, Rhodes University
• Boise State University Virtual Crusader Pilgrimage
• Medieval Crusades Site

Day 6, Friday

Up early again to explore the Yafo Flea Market (which is under construction until 2003, so it could be an interesting exploration) and wander the old city of Yafo. We will visit the underground remains found not long ago in the main square outside the church of St. Peter’s Monastery. If the church is open, we can visit it and then go on to explore the “new” old city. I was told that there was so much crime and violence in the old city of Yafo that the Israel government decided to bulldoze much of it down and turned it into a park. What remains of the ancient port city has been turned into artists’ quarters with many of the most famous artists in Israel displaying their works in galleries and shops throughout the twisting streets.

Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel

Living in Israel for some time now, we’ve experienced a lot of what the tourist experiences here, and I have to say that while much of it is very good, a lot of it is just tourist drivel, racing around at high speed packed into buses or vans like sardines, and seeing Israel at 60 mph or 110 kph. “This is – oops! You missed it.” Not that these are any different than the bus tours you get in every city and country in the world, it is just done with the arrogant Israeli flair that seems to make them more tiresome and uncomfortable than they need to be.

But there is a diamond in the rough. The Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel (SPNI) offers fantastic tours all over the country with a focus on the nature and natural side of the country. You learn intensely and intimately about the history and life of the people in these places. You learn how they interacted with their environment and how they made nothing into something in order to survive. You get your hands and knees dirty climbing through underground caves. You get to pretend to make wine. You stand on the rooftops of Jerusalem and hear the bells ringing and the minarets singing, caught up for a moment in history. The leaders are totally passionate about what they are doing and love every moment of it, sharing their excitement with you. You really feel like you are a part of it not just looking at it.

You can get information on their daily tours and tour packages from their web site at http://www.teva.org.il/, though most recently the lack of tourism in Israel has led the site to go all Hebrew. You can call them directly from the US at 011-072-3-638-8688 or within Israel at 03-638-8688. The tours are offered in English and Hebrew, with a few other languages thrown in by special request. Skip the commercial stuff and get right into the heart and spirit of Israel.

By noon we have to be to the Dizengoff Center to test our tastebuds for Shabbat meal at home. Every Friday is a food festival in the Dizengoff Center Mall. We will choose from hundreds of home-made foods representing Arab, Yemenite, and Jewish traditions as well as German, Chinese, Japanese (yes – sushi!), Argentinean, Spanish, Polish, Russian, and many other countries. We carry this home and eat ourselves into a stupor and enjoy the traditional afternoon Shabbat nap. It’s a lazy evening with maybe a little TV or a movie, but very lazy, as is traditional.

Day 7, Saturday

Up early again to drive with Brent and Lorelle north to the Hulah Valley, the main water table for Israel and now a restored nature park with bird viewing towers and blinds. We will pass through the Carmel and Gilboa Mountains with stops to enjoy the incredible view. From the viewpoints we will be able to see much of the north of Israel, and the surrounding countries of Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. If time allows we will stop to shop at one of the ancient Druze villages along the mountain ridge. We will pass through the Jezreel Valley where many famous battles were fought. If there is time we will stop and explore the ancient ruins of Meggido (Armageddon). We will pass by Tiberias and the Sea of Galilee (Kinneret) to the northern reaches of Israel near the Golan Heights. Lunch will be either a picnic lunch or possibly lunch at the Russian immigrant farming community, Bet Dubrovin, a historical museum and restaurant.

The drive home is long and a test of the nerves as we encounter the famous Shabbat Rush traffic Saturday night.

Day 8, Sunday

Sunday is the beginning of another work week in Israel. Time to send out laundry, catch up and make plans for the rest of the week. Could be a day to head in to Jerusalem to explore Yad Vashem (Holocaust Museum), the Israel Museum/Dead Sea Scrolls and the Biblelands Museum. A lot of walking, so comfy shoes is a must along with a lot of water.

Day 9, Monday

Either drive or take a bus tour to Masada and Ein Gedi. If possible, take the SPNI tour of Masada, which would be much better. Masada is an ancient fortress built upon a mountain plateau overlooking the Dead Sea. Built by King Herod, it became a major symbol to the Zionist movement in Israel representing the last refuge of almost 1000 Jews against the Romans in AD 70. They committed suicide rather than giving up to the Romans. Considered zealots for many years by the Jews, this symbol of dying rather than surrendering became the war cry for the Jews returning to Israel: “Remember Masada!” A cable car takes us up to the top and the view is incredible. The archeological ruins are very interesting and it takes about 2 hours to fully explore.

We will then head to Ein Gedi, a popular and famous spa on the Dead Sea for a little playing in the mud and salty water at the lowest point with oxygen in the world.

If there is time and we can make arrangements in advance, we will head south to spend the night in Arad so we can enjoy the nightly “sound and light” show on the west side of Masada.

Day 10, Tuesday

Another day in Jerusalem or spent returning back from Masada and Arad, driving through the northern parts of the Negev, with possible side trips to the Beduin Cultural Museum near Lahav and to Makhtesh Hagadol, the smaller but more vivid of the unusual natural craters in Israel.

Day 11, Wednesday

Judean Hills and caves tours. The tour begins in Jerusalem hosted by SPNI. We will travel to Neot Kedumim, the world’s only biblical landscape reserve, to learn about how life was back during biblical times. How did they survive and live? We will learn a little about wine making, too. Then off to the Absalom Stalactite Caves (also known as Soreq Caves ) which are similar in content to the Carlsbad Caverns, but uniquely different. Discovered in 1967, it is said to contain every form of stalactite ever found. Photography is restricted inside the cave, but we may be able to get permission. We will then head off south of Jerusalem to explore the ancient world of the underground life of Jews during the Roman occupation at Beit Guvrin, which lasted through the first and second temple periods. We will crawl around on our hands and knees through these caves made in the chalk-like mountain, crawling back through time and a way of life foreign to so many of us. Lead by SPNI (Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel).

Day 12, Thursday

Full day walking tour of the old city of Jerusalem from the archaeological and biblical perspectives. The first mention of Jerusalem comes from ancient Egyptian texts from the 20th century BC. Today will be exploring the highlights of all those centuries. The tour begins with the Russian Compound and the “green line”, the border between Israel and Jordan before Israel won all of Jerusalem and pushed Jordan back to its current border along the Jordan River in 1967. We will visit the Cardo, the ancient Roman entrance and main road into the old city built in the 6th century BC; the Museum of the First Temple which goes down below the old city with museum displays and archeological remains from the First Temple period 1000 BC; the famous Wailing Wall, which is part of the remaining wall of the Second Temple destroyed in 70 AD; and walk the Via Dolorosa, the “Way of Suffering” or “Way of the Cross” which is the final walk Jesus made through Jerusalem carrying the cross on the way to his crucifixion, ending at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. We will visit the birthplace and childhood home of Mary and the burial caves of her parents along the way, as well as shop and explore the different quarters of Old Jerusalem.

If there is time and energy, we will have dinner along the pedestrian mall of Ben Yehuda Street, a glimpse at the newer parts of Jerusalem.

Day 13, Friday

Another Shabbat Rush day to get food and any last minute things until 1PM or 3PM and then it is eat and rest and relax, and recover from a busy week.

Day 14, Saturday

Day of choices. We can drive back up north to visit the Golan Heights, Meggido, Bet She’an (a very famous and incredible archeological ruin from Roman/Byzantine times), or explore the wonderful Eretz Museum in northern Tel Aviv. Or we can just relax and you can pack for going home. Haval! (So sad, pity) You will leave totally exhausted, making your trip home easy as you will sleep all the way.

NOTE: All tours are subject to change based upon weather and political conditions. Only two places on the schedule might be influenced by political unrest.

For more information on Israel, check out our link resources page. If you want to learn more about Hebrew and learn some words in Hebrew, we have a page for tourists needing some basic Hebrew terms.

Tel Aviv, Israel