Posting those West Bank photos in the last entry made me realize that I never really wrote about my trip other than the travel journal I kept while I was there, which I might transcribe into here eventually. It’s a little late to do a day-by-day summary now, plus that would be really boring for me, so I’ll just post a few photos. Not all of them are as interesting as the West Bank ones, but at least I wasn’t on a moving tour bus when I took them.
These were the first soldiers we saw in Israel. Because Bush was there for the first two days of the trip, the number of IDF soldiers and police that we saw was about equal to the amount that I was expecting to see. After he left, the number dropped significantly, although there were still way more than you would ever see in America (at least until Bush declares martial law, har har).
This is Haram al-Sharif, or the Temple Mount, depending on who you’re talking to. On our second day, when one of our Palestinian speakers asked where we had been the day before, one of the guys on the trip said we had been to the Temple Mount, and he replied, “You mean al Haram? It hasn’t been a temple for 2000 years.” I’m sure you all know that there aren’t really any images in Islam thanks to Denmark, so there’s a lot of really beautiful calligraphy that you can see if you look at the wide blue band with the white scribbles on them at the top of the first level and below the dome. Walking around the plaza was a pretty surreal experience for me, especially imagining how different this site must have looked on the first day of al-Aqsa Intifada. A Palestinian Israeli guy spent about ten minutes telling us different things about it and afterwards when we thanked him, he said, “I’m doing this for free, for no money, because I only want to ask you one thing. Please pray for peace to come to Jerusalem. I’ve lived here all my life and I’m beginning to think that I will never see peace in my lifetime, so whatever your religion is, please pray.”
Muslim fundamentalists get a lot of (well-deserved) crap for the way that they treat women, but visiting the Western Wall showed a side that almost always goes undiscussed. The Israeli government lets the Orthodox rabbis run the holy sites, which means that when you visit the wall, there’s a separation between the genders. On the other side of this fence, there are some Israeli boys having their bar mitzvah ceremonies. Their female relatives have to stand on plastic chairs in order to see, even though most of these families are probably secular, because if they weren’t, they’d have the bar mitzvah at their temples and not at a national holy site. Women also have to whisper when they pray because their voices are “distracting.”
Every crack in the wall has a prayer in it and there are tons on the ground where they’ve fallen out. Apparently, the rabbis have a special ceremony to dispose of them — maybe they go in a holy dumpster. (You think I’m kidding.)
Speaking of the holy dumpster…
This was taken in the Orthodox neighborhood that we visited. You can dispose of old prayer books and things like that in it.
These were some cool dudes walking on El Wad Road in the Arab Quarter. I think they were the first people wearing keffiyehs that I saw. It’s funny how you take pictures of things that become commonplace afterwards.
Hijab models in the shouk.
Which would be worse: a box left lying on the ground for a toy AK-47 or a box for a real one?
I had seen plenty of ultra-Orthdox by this point (some with some really ridiculous payos — the sideburns), but this was the first guy who I was able to get a picture of quickly enough that I knew he wouldn’t see me and think I was an ignorant American tourist. Which I am, obviously. The strangest thing was seeing the ultra-Orthdox talking on their cellphones…probably because I was unconsciously associating them with the Amish.
Obligatory camel photo:
We didn’t have time to ride it, but considering the guy was dragging it around like a pony at a birthday party, I’m not sure I would have wanted to. Next year in Jordan, I guess.
We took a tour of the security barrier with an IDF spokesperson, who wasn’t as biased as you would have expected. This is a pretty smooth running checkpoint, obviously, or we wouldn’t have visited it.
This is from the University of Haifa (sort of a suburb of Tel Aviv). The third farthest white blob is in Lebanon. Gives a little context into why Hezbollah is such a problem for the Israelis.
This is the only modern-day propaganda I’ve ever seen, from when we visited the Golan Heights. It went from “Israelis skiing! Israelis windsurfing! Israelis swimming in the Dead Sea!” to “THE SYRIANS WANT EVERY LAST DROP OF WATER IN THE GOLAN” in about ten seconds. They filmed this in the ’90s, when it seriously looked like Israel was going to return it to Syria.
I love that they felt like it was necessary to include “guns” on this. This was outside of Carpaneum, the town where Jesus lived by the Galilee. Any time our guide talked about Jesus, he would always say, “allegedly,” like — “Carpaneum is the town where Jesus allegedly walked on water.”
This — seriously — was the Tree of Peace…
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
The tomb of the guy who started it all and the tomb of the guy who almost fixed it all. Rabin was the first person to break the uniformity and not have a tomb that looked like Herzl’s.
