Jerusalem, for one, is a striking contrast to Tel Aviv. And not only its Old City, where three major religious groups (plus Armenians) live side by side -- if often uneasily -- and cross paths every day. But even in West Jerusalem (the Jewish part of the new city) there is a tremendous range of lifestyles and practices: from flip-flop and shorts-wearing youths to wig- and hat-clad religious couples. On a bus ride from the city center to Hebrew University that takes you through several neighborhoods you can encounter at least a dozen different religious groups and levels of observance, judging by people's outfits and head-coverings (wigs, hats, berets, or head scarfs for women; kipot of different hues, fedoras of many shapes and sizes, and fur hats -- yes, even in July! -- for men).
But the most diversity we came across on our trip back north last week (again, in search for cooler weather): a day in the Galilee, a day in the Golan Heights, and central north and northern coast on the way back. On this trip we once again realized that all of this variety of people and vistas is packed into a pretty small country: I've heard that Israel is a size of New Jersey, not the biggest state of the Union in any way; and our drive from the central coast to the most north-eastern part and back -- with backtracking and getting lost couple of times -- was less than 600 km (about 350 miles, shorter than a one-way between Los Angeles and San Francisco).
Our first stop was Nazareth, Jesus's boyhood town. On the way there, we passed what is known as the "Triangle," an area of several Israeli-Arab towns adjacent to the Green Line, the border between Israel and the West Bank. I did not know that this area had a special designation, nor that we were going to go through such a tight cluster of Arab villages. But it was hard not to notice: tall white minarets and golden domes of mosques of each township looked beautiful and dramatic on the green background of the Samarian Hills. I was struck by how wrong my preconceptions of "Arab villages" were: from what I could see from the car window, there were no dirt huts with straw roofs; the houses were modern, several stories high, made of pretty, lime-color stone, and some looked quite affluent. This is not to say that all Arab citizens of Israel are rich (although apparently home-ownership among Arabs in Israel is higher by 20 percent than among Israeli Jews) or even economically on par with Jewish Israelis, but I am not surprised to know that almost two thirds of them are not crazy about the proposal to transfer this "Triangle" with its inhabitants to the Palestinian state in exchange for Israel's retention of some Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
Nazareth itself is the largest Arab city in the country with insignificant non-Arab population, but almost a third of its inhabitants are Christians. Here again my expectations were completely off the mark: I thought we were going to a small, quaint, and charming town that had not changed much since two millennia ago, which would be mobbed by Christian pilgrims. But we actually had trouble locating major landmarks: the access to the center of this sprawling city of 65,000 residents was poorly marked, streets had four-digit numbers instead of names, expected crowds of tourists trekking in the direction of holy sites were nowhere to be found, and the sites themselves were often unmarked and obscured by roofs covering the old-city market. (As I've discovered, in this part of the world, the "old city" often means a vast market -- shuk in Hebrew, or souq in Arabic -- plus a few religious institutions; and more often than not the former takes precedence over the latter in visibility and vibrancy. I don't know whether it's an authentic remnant of the past, an economic necessity for the locals who work at the market, something recreated for the tourists -- either to emulate the bygone days or to make money off them -- or a combination of all, but it's a fact that material and spiritual are inseparable at least in their proximity to each other.)
Nazareth is famous as a place where Mary got the news that she would give birth to Jesus, which in Christian tradition is known as the Annunciation. There are at least two churches in the city marking the place of the supposed event: a smallish Greek Orthodox painted inside in a traditional Orthodox way with colorful depictions of the annunciation, various saints and angels, and Jesus looking down from the dome (and where a woman, even if she is wearing a modest skirt and a long-sleeve shirt is considered indecent if she crosses her legs while sitting down); and an enormous, two-story modern Catholic basilica that incorporates the presumed remnants of Mary's dwelling and displays probably a hundred of her likenesses made by artists from all over the world (one Mary looked Japanese and was clad in a kimono and another was black and wore traditional African garb and turban).
We looked at a few more churches, passed by a couple of mosques, had a lunch of falafel with pickles (an ingenious mix of the Orient and Occident), and headed out of this expansive and not very charming place to find ourselves less than an hour later in another Greek Orthodox Church. But this one was located in such a serene place -- right on the shore of the Sea of Galilee (the Kinneret), surrounded by a lush and well-tended garden, with seemingly no one but a family of peacocks and a kitten around -- we could not but linger.
The pretty white church with maroon domes belongs to a monastery of one monk, who showed up soon after our arrival and showed us around and inside the church. We talked to him for almost an hour. He was a man in his forties and a monk for almost twenty years first in his native Greece, then in Jerusalem, and now in this monastery of Seven Apostles. He told us he was fluent in four languages: Greek, English, Russian, and Arabic. The last two are the languages of the two main groups of pilgrims the monastery gets from within Israel; his Hebrew, he said, was so-so since Israeli Jews are rare visitors to the church.
After a short stop for dinner in Tiberius -- the biggest town on Lake Kinneret, which is a popular destination for Christian pilgrims as well as Jewish youth groups from Israel and abroad, all of whom seem to take great pleasure in evening boat cruises with loud music and fireworks -- we headed to our overnight accommodations, guestrooms at Kibbutz Manara, almost all the way to the northern tip of the country. The kibbutz is situated on a cliff nearly 900 meters (about 3,000 feet) above the sea level and can be reached either by cable car or by a narrow and windy road part of which runs right along the Lebanese border (we saw the border, the "No Crossing" signs, and a Lebanese village on the other side of the fence the next morning). When I booked our room at the kibbutz I knew it was a mere 100 meters from the border, but somehow -- ignorance? denial? inability to connect information from the media to reality? -- I did not realize this was one of the areas heavily bombed by Hezbollah during the 2006 war. A nearby town of Kiryat Shmona, with a population of some 22,000 (and a place of the best iced coffee I've head in this country, served by a cute young guy in a local Aroma coffee chain) was hit by over a thousand of Katyusha rockets in a month-long conflict, which forced half of the local population to flee the area and the other half to stay in shelters. But there is hardly any damage visible now, at least to a naked eye; and the locals joke about their proximity to the border: at the kibbutz, we ran into two of its members who suggested that we visit the kibbutz orchard but not be alarmed by a fence on the way, "Lebanon is on the other side of the road," they laughingly reassured us.
We chatted with these two women for a while. We intruded on their late-night drink-and-cigarette but they didn't seem to mind warmly answering our questions about the kibbutz, the area, and themselves. The few others we encountered on the kibbutz were just as nice, warm, and open to the strangers. A little bit too open I thought at one instance: we showed up at Manara's gate (that looked a bit like a border crossing or so it seemed to me then) close to midnight, in the dark, but the guard -- in some sort of uniform and with a machine gun -- just waved us through without asking who we were or why we were there. I had expected a lot more suspicion toward strangers in this conflict-prone area. The reservations manager with whom I'd spoken on the phone to book our room greeted me like a long-time friend when I came by in the morning to ask about local attractions and insisted I have some breakfast even though it officially had been long over. This discrepancy between Israelis' rudeness on the sidewalks and especially on the roads and their warmness and conviviality as soon as you engage them in even the most trivial of conversations boggled my mind until our local friends-sociologists explained that Sabra -- a name for a native-born -- comes from tzabar, a name for a local cactus plants that is rough and thorny on the outside but soft and sweet on the inside. The metaphor seems to be accurate, albeit a bit cheesy for me, but I am still looking for a more solid sociological explanation of this phenomenon.
The view from our room at Manara was truly spectacular: down below -- the Hula valley , much of which was neatly divided into rectangular, different-colored patches of farmland and man-made ponds with occasional insets of towns and nature reserves...
...above -- on the other side of the valley -- peeking though the haze, fog, and clouds were the summits of the Golan Heights mountains, rocky, sparsely populated, and homes to ski resorts with natural snow in the winter, with their backs to the Syrian border.
This narrow strip of land no more than 25 km (about 15 miles) between Lebanese border in the west and Syrian disengagement line in the east is a home to many national park, archaeological and historic points of interest, and holy sites for various religions, as well as wineries and cheese-making facilities. Deciding to buy cheese and wine from the supermarket later, we went to see more ruins and some nature reserves. In just one day we saw remnants of several cultures: Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Middle-Ages Arabic, Crusader, Medieval Jewish, all built next and often on top of each other. Greeks worshiping half-man half-goat, Romans with their aqueducts and cardos, Arabs riding graceful mares, Jews studying the Talmud, and Christian warriors had been there centuries before us and now we came to admire the traces they left and imagine their lives. If there is the place to study history, it must be here.
But some 30 minutes away is a modern marvel: the Hula Valley. Human settlements and land cultivation have been here since prehistoric times, but the area turned swampy, malaria-ridden, and inhospitable some 600 years ago. Since mid-19th century there were a series of attempts to drain the valley, but it was completed only in 1958, ten years after Israel's independence. The drainage of the valley was beneficial for agriculture but caused serious ecological problems harming both humans and the wildlife and in the 1990s the valley was redeveloped to accommodate agricultural needs of the country and preservation of the environment. Today, the valley is a home to vast farmlands and a nature reserve, which is an ornithological crossroads for some 500 million migrating birds a year. The coexistence of farmers and birds is not always easy as they sometimes get in each other's way, but it seemed to us that both sides were willing to compromise as we found the valley to be one of the most tranquil areas of the country whose calm was interrupted only by chirping cranes and softly roaring tractors. This is not the Middle East I knew from the American news coverage.
The next day, from the valleys and mountains of the Galilee and Golan we drove back to the coast. At the advice of a friend, we took the "northern road," a route that goes east to west right by the Lebanese border. It was late morning on Friday, the first day of the weekend (I'm still not quite used to the workweek begin on Sunday and end on Thursday), and even the cows we passed by were taking it easy in trees' shadows. We were looking for yet another ruin -- a 5th century synagogue, but we took a wrong turn and found ourselves in front of a closed unattended gate with a sign "Stop! Border in Front of You." The guards must have gone home for Shabbat.
After exploring the synagogue...
...there were actually two of them side by side in this little ancient town, and the lintel of the second one (which is now at the Louvre) read "Peace in this place and all of Israel. Yosef Halevi son of Levi made this lintel. May his deeds be blessed. Peace" -- and a lunch of bread, cheese, grapes, and wine in the shadows of oak trees, we continued east, to another marvel -- of nature this time -- Rosh Hanikra, whose cliffs and grottoes are a product of thousands if not millions of years of interaction between rocks and water. Unlike sparsely attended attractions in the Golan and Galilee some 100 kilometers away, which seemed to be of interest mostly to local families (often religious and, I assume, Zionist; although once we spotted a lone Muslim couple), this one was packed with Russian, Australian, French, British tourists on bus tours, as well as with Israelis with kids on a weekend getaway.
Inside...
...and outside:
I thought that the white of the rock surrounded by the blue of the water and the sky resembled the colors of Israeli flags displayed only fifty or so meters from the grottoes entrance: Rosh Hanikra is yet another border crossing to Lebanon. In fact, this is where on the first day of our trip the bodies of the two Israeli reservists whose kidnapping started the war of 2006 were exchanged for several Lebanese militants held in Israeli prisons and two hundred bodies of combatants. But two days later, nothing reminded of the exchange. I kept wondering how many of our fellow visitors to the grottoes even knew about it: when you're on vacation, especially in a foreign country whose language you don't know, and don't stray far from the beach, historic sites, or nature attractions, it is easy to be oblivious to the present-day significance of places you visit and lives of people who inhabit them. But one should try lest the trip will become another "been-there, done-that" dot on the map.
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