Nablus – the Old City

Leaving Balata with a couple of the friends we had made, we got into a couple of taxis for the short distance ride over to the nearby city of Nablus (maybe 2 kilometers away?). We got out of the taxis in the main square of the city, and I was finally in one of the largest Palestinian cities, one that is firmly pro-independent Palestine. The square itself was a testament to this; the banners and crisscrossing lines with small flags depicting the colors and symbols of the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, the Palestinian National Liberation Front, and a couple other groups which have resorted to political violence. As per usual with Palestinian places, I was again immersed in a much more real type of “bustle” than any Israeli or American city could ever claim. People walking past and in between and around and through each other, all on their way to something but with a completely different sense of “personal space” and the lessened necessity of feeling the need to be on time. We met up with an acquaintance of the guys from Balata, a Brazilian man who works as a tour guide, or more accurately, head of public relations for Nablus. With him as our volunteer guide, we got quite the amazing tour of the Old City there that we couldn’t have gotten otherwise.

That guy knew EVERYONE.

Our first stop was an unexpected one; just like every other stop. We went into an olive oil soap factory, apparently a large part of the economy of Nablus (or at least it once was). We went inside a huge building where the the smell of olive oil was in the air, and got to walk in and amongst the boiling contraptions that prepared the oil for turning into soap. We walked up very narrow stairs that were slick with spilled olive oil, as all of the movement of things between levels of the building are done manually. The upstairs room of that soap factory is one of the coolest places ever… like the sort of place that is the dream of every child (and not a few adults), as half the floor is taken up by a giant cooling-to-a-solid retaining area for soap, and the other half is slippery enough that it puts most ice skating rinks to shame. Yes, even though I am now 21 (!), my shoes were worn down enough that I did me a little bit of “soap” skating, as it were. We slid on over to the next room over, which can only be described as the soap cooling towers room. They stack up the soap into chimney-like structures, and leave them there to age – as we were told, soap needs to be aged like fine wine, especially since they only offer fine soap

We each bought some of the soap (which I have yet to use, now that I think about it), and departed for our next stop… a walking tour through parts of the Old City of Nablus. Amongst other things, we saw a famous old mosque whose name escapes me at the moment (but you can see it too in the photos); we also walked by an unbelievable number of small shrines and commemorative monuments to people, innocent or engaged in (sometimes armed) political opposition to the state of Israel, who have been killed. Although I don’t particularly appreciate the fact that many of those memorials have weapons and guns and calls to continue fighting as part of them, it was overwhelming to never walk more than 20 meters without seeing another plaque proclaiming that this person was killed at this spot by the IDF on this date. These were no fakes or mere propaganda, either – many of these sites, and plenty of stretches of walls in between were riddled with bullet holes. Hearing some of the accompanying stories to the destruction we witnessed was also horrifying. Attached is a photograph of a house undergoing reconstruction for the 11th time… and the 9th time it was destroyed, it was bulldozed by the IDF without any warning given to the occupants. The mother and 7 of the daughters of that family died, leaving a father with one son and his last surviving daughter to try and pick up the pieces. Perhaps it is “understandable” for outsiders and Israelis to subscribe to the “security” argument, but think for a moment – what good came of that IDF incursion? Innocent people were killed in a very graphic and public way; private property was treated with callous disregard and destroyed (again); the IDF didn’t get whichever alleged terrorist they were looking for; and maybe 1, maybe 5, maybe 20 more residents of the West Bank now had additional impetus to consider political violence as their only course of action. I cannot tell you how many times I have heard an Israeli/foreign supporter of Israel tell me that “this is what those terrorists do to us; how can we make peace with them?” in a tone of moral indignation and with the assumption of automatically holding the moral high ground. Now, forgive me for trying to apply systematics to my experiences and the way the world works, but is it so different for innocent people to get killed by a terrorist attack with a bomb (thus destroying a building) as compared with other innocent people getting killed by a bulldozer (thus destroying a building as well)? Did either of the sets of innocent people have any warning? Did either of the sets of innocent people do anything wrong? This is the point in time when far too many people I know would make an “it was in the name of security” argument, which I categorically reject. That sort of argument has the built-in assumption that somehow it is worse for innocent Israelis to die as compared with innocent Palestinians, which is racism at its ugliest (particularly since I routinely hear these sorts of sentiments from individuals who are in the liberal American system of higher education, supposedly).

That put out there for your consideration, we eventually stopped into another outstanding little anomaly… a former British Mandate prison converted into a candy factory. Nablus, it seems, is known as the “sweetest city in the West Bank,” as it apparently adds sugar to EVERYTHING. As my experiences that afternoon proved to be true. The candy factory was probably the best-smelling place I have ever been… imagine going into a place where very fine sugar powder and dust is in the air constantly, so the very air you breath in is a riot of various [delicious] flavors and sugary heaven, essentially. We also had some candied chickpeas, which were surprisingly delicious.

We stopped into a spice factory and retail shop, which holds a special place in my heart: to date, of all the places I have been in my life, this one wins the Most Eclectic Pile of Stuff award. As you can see in the photographs, they had everything from authentic Turkish fez and scimitars (check out the photo of me modeling them, Ralph Lauren-style) to World War II artillery shell casings-turned flower vases to everything in between. The spices also made the air in that place almost too strong; one breathed in a mix of the freshest coffee, cumin, saffron, cinnamon, and then HUGE barrels-worth of zatar… it smelled good, but when mixed together, it smelled… strong, lets put it.

We visited one of the original Turkish bathhouses in the city, and since it was a men’s day (they alternate genders on different days), only a few from our group were able to go in and see. I have never been to a place as humid as it was in that area… I actually couldn’t breath, it was so hot and steam-filled. It seems like I am not cut out for working shoveling coal into any trans-Atlantic ocean-liner’s boiler room. We were told that we HAVE to return and set up appointments to get the full body treatment, as we would feel like brand-new human beings afterwards (I have to wonder if that experience will renew my warranty).

The last major stop of the day was two-fold: first we stopped and got authentic, fresh kanafeh. Let me be a bit more emphatic… our buddy the tour guide brought us into a kanafeh shop’s kitchen and put us in the way of the poor guys just trying to cook the stuff, so we would know EXACTLY what we were about to eat and why we should expect to enjoy it. And my goodness gracious did we enjoy it… it is a base of fresh goat’s cheese on top of very thin pasta, and then all sweetened with fresh honey…. Even with that description and the photos of it, I still cannot successfully impart to you just how incredibly delicious that experience was. After eating that and walking around a little bit more, we eventually went for lunch in a hole-in-the-wall place owned by a buddy of our guide… but not just any buddy. This kindly old man was 1) a really good cook and 2) a retired HARDCORE Communist from back in the day, when he did prison time under the British and so forth. Good times, and good food… although I think some of the vegetables were unwashed, as I was very, very sick for several days after returning home.

We had some intensely sweet drinks at a cafe (like, fresh lemonade + 2 lbs of sugar and then some sort of fruit syrup + whipped cream ambrosia mmmmmmm), and then departed for the long, long trip back to Jerusalem. Check out the next post for the end of the story. (I am aware that this post and the last post have some pictures not flipped the right direction; I tried fixing it and nothing worked, so they remain as they are for now)

Balata – UN Refugee Camp

A few weekends ago, I had the opportunity to travel with some good friends up north to the city of Nablus (I talk about that part of our visit in the next blog post) and the nearby UN refugee camp known as Balata, because of the village they still lease the land from. Operated by the UN since its creation in 1950, the camp today is incredibly large in terms of population, but extremely small physically: it is a one square kilometer piece of land with 26,000 people living on it. The official UN figure given is closer to 22,000, but they haven’t done a recent census according to the refugees who showed us around the camp. That is getting slightly ahead of myself, though; the trip to even get there is quite an endeavor in and of itself.

We departed in the early morning on Saturday, taking an Arabic bus from outside the Student Village towards the nearby Palestinian provisional capital of Ramallah (as a point of pronunciation, think “ruh-MULL-lah”). On the way, we had to pass through the massive walls around Jerusalem, and then walk through them on foot to go find a shared taxi towards the north. In the middle of Ramallah, the taxi drivers all congregate in a massive parking garage structure where there isn’t really enough room for all the vehicles present, but nevertheless they eke out a successful living based on squeezing people in between taxi vans to climb in for the ride. And what a ride it turned out to be – a whole bunch of firsts for me that day. It was the first time I got to see the very conservative fashion for Muslim women, where they wore not only a hijab (head-covering) and a long skirt, but also a veil and even gloves, to cover all skin except for their eyes. It was the first time I had driven through a large Palestinian town which was so clearly Muslim in character, so the character of the street was different than Bethlehem for example, where one could see nuns walking past Muslim girls with their hijabs. We got to see a great many settlements on our way north, since our status as foreigners afforded us the right to take the settler’s road which had much fewer roadblocks and was of much higher quality than the roads taken care of by the Palestinian Authority. The two other points of interest were things I was unable to get photographs of as we drove by so quickly. First, we drove past a small Palestinian neighborhood’s town square with a monument in the middle. It wasn’t just any monument, however; it was a stone tablet with the iconic image of Saddam Hussein firing a gun upon the front, and the Iraqi coat of arms going down the side. Not what I was expecting to see, but that is how life goes here. Speaking of which, the other point worth mentioning was that we passed by a Palestinian furniture store being raided by 10 or more IDF soldiers, but it seemed fairly calm – perhaps a “routine” check or some such? I will never know, but it was another reminder of where we were.

We had to get out of one van and into another at a certain checkpoint, and traveled the rest of the way to our final destination. We arrived in the outskirts of Nablus near the Jacob’s Well church, and walked towards the Balata camp entrance. One of my friends, Zehra, is a student who spent a summer volunteering with the people of the camp to try and alleviate the suffering of the 6,000 children there through enabling them to plan, set up, and then film short movies about whatever subject they can think of. As such, many people in the camp knew Zehra and we were treated as esteem guests. We went in and already saw the signs of problems – many of the buildings were very old already, and the first several signs of the UN looked rusty enough to be the original signs from 1950.

We got into the Cultural Center (read more about it in the next paragraph), and got a minor introduction to the state of affairs in the camp. Everyone who currently lives there is either still a refugee from the 1948 Israeli declaration of statehood, or has inherited the status from being born into the camp. Unfortunately, the presence of 26,000 people in such a small community which is only residential means that many of them are unemployed. We were told (and the following is merely reporting what we were told, not personal opinions on my behalf) that the IDF makes it their practice to invade the streets of the camp at night and either kill or make warrantless arrests of individuals from the camp. This was awful to hear, but it is also important to remember the other side of the story: Nablus and Balata have been hotbeds of active and violent resistance to the continuing Israeli occupation of the West Bank, spawning such groups as the Al-Aqsa Martyr’s Brigade (see the photographs – I got within 10 feet of their Martyr’s Shrine with their distinctive yellow flag flying above it, which is slightly concerning in retrospect). I cannot pass an easy moral judgment on the situation, and for good reason: this entire conflict is one huge exercise in “who can you actually blame for the original wrong committed?” Is it the fault of poor and frustrated Palestinian refugees raised in an environment free of hope and opportunities? Is it the fault of Israel for continuing the occupation? Is it the fault of the British Mandate for not doing a better job at ceding their control of this area? Is it the fault of Abraham for favoring Isaac (according to the to Jewish tradition) over Ishmael (who is the favored son in the Muslim tradition)? These are only partially rhetorical, as both sides have done all sorts of things wrong. Perhaps the situation would benefit from 1) both sides being able to admit that they have done wrong and thus contributed to the situation and 2) after apologizing to the other side, working with them towards a one-state solution (a two-state solution, I am sorry to report from personal experience, is an awful idea that cannot work-more on this opinion in a future post).

Amidst all of the difficulties, there exists at least one island of calm and healing. This organization is known as the Yafa Cultural Center (YCC), and their name refers to the Arabic city of Yafa/Jaffo, which since the 1950′s expanded and grew into Tel Aviv. They named it this because many of the residents of the camp are from the city of Jaffo, and they feel the need to educate the younger generations about their culture that they were forced to leave behind, and also provide creative and constructive outlets for the rage and sensation of being powerless shared by most of the children in the camp. In addition to being staffed entirely by people who were born and grew up in the camp, the staff plans daily activities of all sorts to keep the kids busy and focused on something other than the problems. As one of our guides explained, they will fight tooth and nail to ensure that this current generation of kids grows up understanding what “hope for the future” means, as the previous generation did not. Although much of what we encountered that day was terrible and saddening and hopeless, there was a humorous detail amidst the hope of this cultural center. Apparently, using a donated computer lab, many of the children of the camp all take turns playing daily rounds of Counterstrike. I am not kidding – they spend a lot of time playing rounds of a computer game famous for placing terrorists against counter-terrorists, and the kids do this to reduce internal senses of aggression and violence that can and do arise from their situation. Having spoken with some of the kids, I can tell you that they had intense positive gains from this virtual method of letting out anger; I am intrigued by the possibility of doing some sort of study there, although the reality is that I would be not entirely safe (given the consistent IDF-resistance clashes that take place there).

I don’t know how to impart all of what I saw and hear and experienced for most of that Saturday in Balata. I have attempted to impart some of what the experience is like, but I think the only way I can even come close to truly conveying the experience is to have a conversation with interested parties in person; face-to-face. That is an offer, by the way, to whomever is so interested on my return home.

The photographs I have chosen to include offer a good mix of the positive and negative aspects of life in the Balata Camp; I just want to try and show what life is like for those 26,000 people visually.

LWF – Planting Olive Trees

This past Friday, I was blessed enough to have the opportunity to go over to the Mount of Olives and help my friends at the LWF plant some olive trees. People who donate money to the work that the LWF does in this land get an olive tree planted in their name in the groves already on the Mt. of Olives, and they are always planted with the help of volunteers.

I woke up early and walked over; same as usual, all except for one detail. As the Pope will be arriving tomorrow (Monday afternoon), the Israeli government has put up a whole bunch of Vatican flags, banners, and standards all over the city on the street lights (in between Israeli flags and the banners of the city of Jerusalem that is). They have been up for several days now, but my walk over to volunteer was the first time it was a nice day AND I had my camera to take some photos (see the attached).

In any event, I arrived to the LWF office and met with Mark Brown and my friend Tyler, and several of the other volunteers. We grabbed some shovels and spades, and went off into the yard to look for suitable locations to plant the trees. We eventually found the ideal locations, and set to digging. I showed the people working with me a couple of tricks on how to properly use the spade to break ground and loosen the soil, so that a person with a shovel can clear it away and thus the job gets done more quickly.

The first tree was the easier soil; the second location had a MASSIVE stone underneath it, and one of the spades was seriously mauled/bent out of shape when someone tried to break through it with a few swings too many. I went over and using my VERY limited Arabic, asked some Palestinian guys working on a sewage pipe system if I could borrow their pickax. They gave it to me, and off I went to break through rock the old-fashioned way. Considering that 1) I still had blisters from Dohar’s farm the weekend before; 2) the pickax was covered in bits of dried cement; and 3) I had no gloves, I did in fact manage to break through the huge rock enough to plant the tree, but at the cost of destroying my left hand (to the tune of multiple blisters

That said, it was an excellent experience. All of the people I was working with are genuinely good people, which is always great. Similarly, the work we did is not only something I enjoy, but it happens to be vitally important for the people of this region. The olives from that olive grove are harvested by volunteers, and then pressed by a Palestinian company. They are bottled in hand-blown glass, done by Palestinian folks, and then shipped internationally for sale. After paying the low costs of production, the remainder of the proceeds directly pay for the health care of Palestinian people from Gaza and the West Bank. Although the couple of hours I spent working a few days ago won’t directly help anyone for a few years, and although those few hours of work won’t fix the entire problem here, I am content in the knowledge that the work I did do will end up perennially doing a little bit to help some of the people in this world who no one else looks out for. I hope I will have more opportunities to do things like this in the future.

And, for those of you who are interested, the aforementioned olive oil is available for purchase. The details can be found here.

Sea of Galilee – Churches and Synagogues Class Trip

The information sheet for the combined class trip to the Galilee today was interesting, as the professor made a point of putting the date using both the Gregorian calender (May 7, 2009) as well as the Jewish calender date (13 Iyar 5769). And, without further ado, the trip:

Bet Alfa
The first stop of our trip was at a kibbutz from the middle of the 1900′s. During the clearing of the land and improvements to make it into a kibbutz, they discovered a beautiful mosaic underneath the topsoil. Digging further, and actually bringing in the Hebrew University (it was their first archaeological dig, as a matter of fact), they discovered the remains of a local, village-based synagogue. The remains are now inside of a building, with a short video presentation explaining the different parts of the mosaic. I say it was a village-based mosaic, as the quality of it is clearly lacking, denoting that they had to use a cheap and therefore less-skilled mosaic artist to do the work. The photos I attached do a good job of highlighting this, as the human figures are not proportionate, intended symmetry is not quite so symmetrical, and so forth. At the same time, it was really neat to see that a local community had saved the money necessary to adorn their house of worship with artwork.

My personal favorite part of the mosaic was the representation of the Binding of Isaac, at the base of the mosaic and closest to where the entrance would have been. The artist couldn’t quite fit the figures properly, but the entirety of the story is there (even a minuscule cloud with the Hand of God coming out of it to stop Abraham from killing his son). For other people, it was a deeply religious experience to pray outside the synagogue while facing Jerusalem, so everyone enjoyed the first stop on the trip.

Yardenit
Departing the synagogue, we traveled up to the north of Israel, stopping right near the “Island of Peace” mentioned in a prior blog post on the border with Jordan. We went west, and stopped at the Yardenit, which is one of the few places that people can go to baptized in the Jordan River. As I mention in one of the photograph’s captions, our group was ironically mostly Jewish, and yet there we were, watching as a few groups of pilgrims got baptized in the Jordan. Some of the guys with us even had kippas and tsi-tsi (the strings hanging from their belts), so I feel as though we were one of the most unique groups to ever visit there. In addition to the well-thought-out place for people to easily and safely walk into the Jordan, there were also multiple panels with a verse from Mark, in a HUGE number of languages. Although I have pictures of the Latin, English, and Scottish Gaelic, they had anything ranging from Sri Lankan to Georgian to anything else you can imagine. It is reminiscent of the church in Jerusalem which has the Lord’s Prayer in hundreds of languages (which I will be visiting soon).

Hamat Tiberias
The third stop on our trip was the ruins of an ancient synagogue on the edge of the Sea of Galilee (in Hebrew, the Kinneret). We enjoyed the view of the Sea, and walked into the property of the ancient ruins/natural springs. Professor Fishman told us all sorts of details about the place, both facts and and conjecture about the site. Among my favorite parts of the entire day was her explanation of the remains of the mosaic floor we were regarding. Smack-dab in the middle of the floor was not only a pagan Zodiac wheel, but the center of that was Helios, the Greek god of the sun. That is almost unbelievable, that an artistic floor in a Jewish house of worship could have a god from a different religion featured prominently in the work. She explained to us that many Jewish and Christian people of the 3rd and 4th century actually took in many Greek beliefs and worked to make them compatible, with people paying respects to the sun before going to church/synagogue.

Kfar Nahum (Capernaum)
We drove a bit down the road, to the remains of Kfar Nahum, or as Christianity has derived the name, Capernaum. We drove past THE Mount, as drawn from the “Sermon on the Mount” on the way in. Going into the grounds of the ancient village, we noticed several points of interest immediately. First, the warning side telling us that our 1) Dogs; 2) Cigarettes; 3) Guns; and 4) Short clothing were not welcome on the grounds (plus, our security guard waltzed right in with his pistol strapped to his side). Second, there was a beautifully-rendered sculpture of Peter greeting all pilgrims and visitors. There was also a long line of recovered columns, and the professor gave us some background information on what we were seeing.

We walked over to the ruins of the fishing village itself, and got to admire what Jesus prophesied (correctly): that Capernaum would never become large nor prosperous. The village was right next to two important buildings: first, an ancient ruined synagogue which was still partially intact, and then the church built on raised pillars above the home of Simon Peter. The synagogue had its rear wall still standing, as well as parts of the side and back walls. There were the remnants of pillars, and so we all sat on the top of the destroyed wall to listen to the professor go on to explain why the beautiful building was constructed during a period of time in which Roman law forbid the construction of new synagogues, and Christian sensibilities were against any ornate Jewish houses of worship (the belief at that time was that the Jews were to be a defeated people, as the professor explained).

We eventually departed the synagogue to go examine the house of Simon Peter, where one of the funniest things in the world happened. The professor, a kindly little old lady with a New York accent, short of stature and high in knowledge, basically the archetype for the coolest grandmother ever, pulled a fast one on all of us. The second sentence in as she explained the significance of Peter’s house being a church at first, and then later getting expanded, was that “the followers of JEEZ-us believed….” I wrote it that way because this short Jewish woman managed to pronounce the name “Jesus” like a fiery Southern Baptist preacher, and that pleases me to no end

I took the offer to go and pray for a moment in the church (it has been a very rough week, in all honesty), and so I walked up the stairs into the oddly-shaped sanctuary. I sat down to pray, and at the same time I was taken in by the absolute beauty of the room I was in. While not Spartan in design, the room was suitably simple for most of the space but then had two aspects that truly made the place special: 1) the wonderful wood-carving panels around the room; and 2) the fact that the glass panels in the middle of the floor looked down into the home of Simon Peter. A really neat place.

Heptapegon (Tagbha)
We walked out of the remnants of Capernaum and took the bus for a 4 minute ride down to another place right on the water; the Hetpapegon Church. The fancy name refers to the seven loaves (and 2 fish) that Jesus used to feed a crowd of 5,000 and the traditional location of it. We went inside the church and were treated to some jolly, happy German pilgrims singing a hymn. Our group went first to the right side of the church to examine the portion of the Nile River mosaic on the side, the more damaged portion. It is nearly as odd to the find the pagan symbol of the Nile River (fertility, the Nile gods, etc) on the floor of a Christian church as it was to find Helios firmly on the floors of several synagogues; I suppose the respective peoples enjoyed the imagery and wanted to incorporate it. In the case of this church, perhaps it can be understood that THE church signifying Jesus’ miraculous multiplying of food to have THE symbol of fertile growth of food from the ancient world represented artistically.

We went to the other side of the sanctuary, and enjoyed the other part of the mosaic. On our way out, I noticed and commented on the fact that “this is the first church I have ever seen with a koi pond.” My fellow classmate and tour member Micah pointed out to me, in an understated way, that “yeah, but how many times have you been to a church where Jesus multiplied bread and fish to feed thousands?” I lost that round, it appears :/

Tsippori
We departed and drove towards Nazareth, on the other side of the Sea of Galilee. We arrived at yet another synagogue, and it was neither the best nor the worst of what we saw that day. Check out the photographs, as I posted the explanatory board from the place which shows the entire mosaic floor and the various meanings.

Bet She’arim (Catacombs)
We ended our excellent trip the way every excursion into the world should end… with a trip to a massive network of caves filled with coffins and tombs
In all seriousness, though, we went in even though we had gotten there 17 minutes before they were set to close, and in the typical Israeli style, we argued aggressively enough that they let us in, as “we had come so far” and “were such good students, how couldn’t the let us in?” The professor leading our trip was quite the lady, to be sure.

We looked around what really was a set of caves filled with coffins of stone (some decorated, some whole, some broken, and some plain). The photos do justice to what we saw, and I unfortunately didn’t catch so much of what the professor had to say due to there being lots of people and only a small corridor at points to try and get close within to listen to her.

All in all, an excellent trip that was very informative and well-planned.

Sderot – the Border with Gaza

In the middle of our tour of Sderot with Jacob, he offered to take us up to the best observation point overlooking the Gaza Strip, to which we readily agreed. We drove over towards the Israeli side of the border, passing next to a kibbutz on our way.

Arriving at a gate, Jacob told us we had to get out of the car and walk up to the parking lot. It was a large gravel parking lot with several interesting features immediately around it. First of all, there was an iteration of the ubiquitous IDF watchtower on the edge of the lot, but with more fortifications around it than usual. It was part of a line of widely-spaced towers, giving us a clear idea of the Israeli side of the line, but not where the border line was exactly. There was a public IDF memorial to a Druze general who had fallen in battle. The middle of the parking lot was some sort of electronics/radio tower. Finally, on the edge of the parking lot was a civilian observation tower on the side of a small hill, with an artistic rendition of a map of the Gaza Strip in front of it.

We immediately walked towards the tower, and Jacob started giving some orientation and facts about the Strip. He pointed out the power station at Ashkelon, the location of Gaza City, the huge bare land in the middle of Gaza where the Israeli government bulldozed Jewish settlements and then forced the settlers to leave, and so forth. He pointed out something terrible to see – in the midst of 3-story buildings of the Strip as far as the eye could see, there were 7 or 8 huge, brand-new-looking skyscrapers. He explained to us that those are condominium-style apartments, built by Yasser Arafat with misused international aid money for use by his cronies. I don’t know if that is entirely true, but those buildings were too out of character to just accept them as they were.

We continued to listen to what he had to say, but three major facts really stood out to me. First of all, even from the distance of 1 kilometer, I could tell that major parts of the Strip were simply piles of rubble, left over from the recent Operation Cast Lead. As construction materials are illegal to bring into Gaza at present (see my previous blog post for the reasons given for this), people simply have not been able to rebuild much of anything. Second, Jacob expressed all sorts of excitement at going up to the lookout point as it was so obviously a clear and bright day. Once we got there, I was surprised that Gaza seemed so cloudy and foggy. It was explained to me that there is simply that much pollution coming off of Gaza, so as to make it look like it was cloudy only over that part of the land. That is deeply distressing, in and of itself.

Finally, the sort of “**GASP** Gaza” sentiments that we kind of had before getting there were at least partially dispelled by our time spent at the observation point. It was refreshing to see that although people inside the Strip do fire rockets, and Hamas does indeed mistreat its own people very much so, and all of the other known (and unknown, un-mourned) tragedies that occur; it is also just a piece of land with people on it, many of whom just want to live in peace and let their kids get an education and be successful. Just the same as most other places in the world, so it is intensely saddening for me that the peaceful people therein are punished alongside and because of the actions of those evil people located there. As Jacob’s explanations confirmed further, and my own personal experiences have highlighted, there is an aspect to this conflict that is not often-discussed by anyone. While the Israelis are unfortunately attacked and hurt and damaged by some Palestinian people who resort to violence, the majority of the Palestinian people are victims to both some Israelis (settlers, and sometimes members of the IDF, unfortunately), as well as every single Palestinian political force/government which has yet been formed. They have either been rife with corruption (Fatah), or they have been completely undemocratic and fairly extremist in their actions (the PLO, Hamas). I hope and pray for the day when the Palestinian people have a representative political group which has the best interests of individual Palestinians in mind in place of personal political concerns, or any of the other number of issues that currently exist.

Here are the photographs I ended up taking of the area (they are as clear as I could focus them, considering the large amount of pollution emanating from the Strip):

Sderot – the Town and its People

This past Wednesday, I organized a trip for myself and a few friends to go visit the Israeli town of Sderot. Located a mere kilometer from the border with Gaza, the town has unfortunately been shelled by rockets and mortar fire for 8 consecutive years at this point. I wanted to go experience it personally, and my friends wanted to go with me. As such, I contacted the Sderot Media Center, as I had heard of the tours they offer of the situation there to anyone and everyone who is interested. I spoke with a guy named Jacob, and he explained to me what to do (rent a car, and drive down there), and so the trip was set up…

…all except for unexpected difficulties in dealing with the Avis car rental people. Théo had reserved the car for 1 day for a price of 70 euros, which we all agreed was a fair deal. We got there, and the Israeli woman working the desk was absolutely unwilling to deal with us or even allow us to take the car we had reserved. After arguing with her, as well as the manager, we actually eventually ended up getting the car for 2 days instead of 1, and for a mere 56 euros. Not sure how that worked out, as the bulk of the arguing had to be done by Théo, as he is 25 and thus old enough (24 or older) to rent a car in Israel. We eventually got the keys and car itself, and thus were on our way. I am glad that Théo was both required and willing to drive, as drivers in both Israel and Palestine are incredibly unsafe in their habits.

We drove along the beautiful route and had the requisite conversations making fun of the various nationalities present in the car (all in good fun, as I am indeed a horse-riding cowboy who only eats hamburgers and drinks Coca Cola ). We were surprised that we got there so fast (it was only about an hour’s drive), and so I called Jacob. After a bit of phone tag, we eventually figured out that he was in a car two behind us, so we followed him into the center of town and the Media Center.

Getting out of the car and introducing ourselves, we went inside and already got to see one Qassam rocket. We met some of the other people there, many of whom have lived in the United States/were previously citizens there (Jacob is from Silver Springs Maryland, as a matter of fact). We first went and visited the police station of Sderot, which is always on the tours offered by the Center. We went inside and out to their back yard, and got to look at the stacks of Qassam rocket bodies and other rocket remnants. Jacob explained that these were only a sampling of the rockets which have fallen, as the police take them away. Every rocket is marked with paint showing the time and date of when it fell, and there are other immediate details. First of all, the rockets are predominantly constructed from metal irrigation piping for the body, and then carved-up street signs for the fins. This is already worse than merely rockets being fired, as all the innocent people in Gaza are consistently regarded as complicit in the construction and launching of those rockets, and thus are also punished by the bans on irrigation materials, construction equipment/materials, and many types of foods (they cannot get spaghetti noodles, as apparently they can be melted down into some sort of fuel substitute). The rockets are filled with ball bearings and bolts and the like, in order to create more shrapnel. Nasty stuff.

We left the police station and went to the newly fortified playground in the middle of a residential area. This playground has two brand-new cement caterpillars, but they are different than anything else of similar appearance in the world. These two are 7-inch thick reinforced tubes of cement (one big difference) which are painted joyfully and colorfully on the outside, but have an additional feature on the inside. They have orange rings painted, so that the kids know how far back into the tube they need to get during alarms in order to avoid getting killed/wounded by shrapnel from the rockets. That is in and of itself disgusting, awful, terrible, and the reality for these children. Beyond the obvious, additional details from the tour later highlighted one of my fears as being true: the majority of the kids in Sderot grow up with the rockets and hearing about the Gazan source of those rockets, so they will probably be unable to easily consider any sort of peaceful resolution to the situation as a result. I am also sorry to report that beyond being obviously inclined to support the citizens of Sderot with what he had to say, Jacob voiced a fair number of fairly racist sentiments, such as correcting us, his guests, every time we said “Palestinians” – he insisted that we say “Arabs,” as he felt that all of them are the same (evil) people. Highly unfortunate, especially since we walked away from the playground and noticed a house getting a bomb shelter built as an addition. The laborers on top were Palestinian, and although I captured a shot of the entire situation without seeing them at first, they protested to other people taking any photos – Jacob told us to take photographs anyways, as (and I quote directly) “they have no power here.” I wish I could report otherwise.

We departed for a street which had been hit hard by the rockets, and Jacob continued his explanation of events in Sderot. We saw partially destroyed houses awaiting repairs, and we also saw fully demolished homes which have no chance of being repaired and simply need to be knocked down the rest of the way. He showed us a synagogue and told us a chilling story: a few years ago, there was a 450-person event in the synagogue at some point in the afternoon. The majority of the people departed for their homes, save for one family who stayed behind to help clean up from the festival. Her children were playing out in the street (thank God), and the father was in the back part of the synagogue doing some work. The mother of the family finished cleaning the front room, and locked the doors to it so she could finish closing down the synagogue for the day. Mere minutes later, a rocket fell directly into that same front room, utterly demolishing it. No one was killed or hurt, but this should illustrate just how precarious life can be in Sderot, with destruction happening at any moment and essentially without warning (15 seconds worth of alarm, when it goes off [only part of the time due to weather conditions]). We ended our time on that street by examining the damage that the smaller Qassams cause to the pavement, which is no longer cost-effective to repair.

We departed that street and visited two more places within the city of Sderot. First, we went to one of the schools and saw something I never imagined happened in real life. One can read in history books about buildings being fortified, but I saw something entirely different. The schools in and around Sderot all have a dome constructed over of them, of 2-meter thick steel armor. This is way beyond sandbags or the usual in terms of fortifying a building, but for good reason; a school was once randomly hit by a rocket on Shabbat, but if it would have hit during classes, many kids would have died or been severely wounded (based on how the damage occurred).

After our visit to the lookout point over the Gaza Strip (see the next post), we got to visit the outside of something which has been featured in some news sources as of recently. The Jewish National Fund (JNF) has funded and planned the construction of a massive fortified indoor playground for the kids of Sderot. Built within an abandoned warehouse in the industrial neighborhood of Sderot, the JNF has spent a bit over USD $5 million to partially rebuild it, then fortify it and fill it with playground equipment and a computer lab. We were unfortunately told to leave by a stern Israeli man who spoke no English, so we only got to see the outside (as you can see in the photographs).

In summary then, our trip to Sderot was a difficult but necessary experience. I am glad that I got to personally witness one of the many ways in which humanity can stoop so low and devalue human life, as it served as another major experientially-motivated reason as to why international religious aid work is my vocational calling in this life.

The Golan Heights

Beginning of the Trip
Early this past Sunday (for me, waking up at 4:50 AM, ugh…), my ‘Middle East: Coexistence and Rapproachement’ class had a field trip to the Golan Heights in the north of Israel. Our Professor, Dr. Meron Medzini, is quite the genius and therefore we knew we had a great day ahead of us. We gathered outside of the Student Village, and while everyone was clearly tired from getting up so early, Scott and I were still DESTROYED from our previous endeavors at the Tent of Nations the preceding two days. We all got onto the chartered bus, and started off for the north.

Taking Route 6, which hugs the coast of the Mediterranean and also next to the western edge of the West Bank, we drove onwards for quite a long time, and stopped once for breakfast and fuel. Eventually, we reached our first stop: an abandoned, bullet-ridden fortress built by the British Mandate police, and contested by the British, the Jews, and the Arabs at various times (check out the couple of pictures). From where we were, we could see one of the Jordanian watch towers marking the border, and we drove over the north-most crossing between the…

Israeli-Jordanian Border
We arrived at what is known as “the Island of Peace,” somewhat paradoxically at this point. Located right near the border, it used to be a constant area for Israeli school trips, at least until a group of children was fired upon by a deranged Jordanian border guard (see the photos for the full story there). We examined the extremely tight security of the border, with the multiple barbed wire-lined fences, electronic fence monitoring systems, smooth dirt walkways examined daily for footprints, large concrete walls, watchtowers, and castle-style emergency drawbridge doors. It seems as though they are slightly interested in keeping people on their respective sides of the border at points that aren’t official crossings.

We drove part of the way up the side of the mountains which make up the edge of the Heights, and stopped so we could examine the Jordan Rift Valley and the security measurements therein from a different angle. This is where the attached photographs of a Syrian bunker and abandoned Syrian customs house come from. We departed up the extraordinarily steep mountainside, thus arriving at…

The Golan Heights
The plateau or mesa that makes up the area known as the Golan Heights is actually some of the most arable, fertile land I have yet seen in Israel. There are fields of grain and wheat, and large vineyards, and everyone’s yard is green and has flowers and other plants in front of them, which is unlike a lot of other parts of Israel. The Heights are also home to another common sight: large, fenced-off areas that warn visitors that there are land mines in those areas – all of those presents are little gifts left by the retreating Syrians in 1967, and have not yet been dealt with by the Israeli government as of present. As additional garnish for the Heights, one can also find things like blown-out Syrian bunkers, ruined Syrian staging areas, exploded Syrian tank hulks, and the occasional Israeli war memorial (sometimes built on top one of the other areas, as it turns out). Beyond those lovely sites, there is an entirely different side to the Heights: the winery, enjoyable scenery facet that the local tourism industry tries to highlight like none other. One of the stops on our trip was to a Golan tourist depot of sorts, where they had a movie and then topographical map with a voice-over tour. The “movie” ended up being a multiple projector immersion experience, with windy parts of the movie turning on the fans mounted on the ceiling, and the waterfalls/rainfall portions of their exhibition of the Golan involved sprinklers on the ceiling opening momentarily to mist all over us, the unwilling audience. It was an extraordinarily optimistic video, which for all intents and purposes portrayed the Golan as the Garden of Eden, simply glossing over details like the acres and acres of land mine fields or the constant state of possible war with nearby Syria and Lebanon over the most fertile lands in the area. Afterwards, we went to the topographic room and checked out the light show plus voice-over… which was also very one-sided in its presentation. My favorite was either the spinning Israeli flag out of blue lights, or perhaps the David and Goliath portrayal of Israeli vs. Syrian tanks (each of these things being in the photograph section).

I am deeply pleased to report that we had lunch at COFFEE ANAN, which is a great story. Basically, it was an overpriced cafe on one of the hills on the Golan Heights, and operated by a nearby kibbutz. They made the odd choice of having a partially-English, partially-Hebrew name, hence “Coffee Anan,” which translates to “Coffee in the Clouds.” In its bilingual state, though, it seems to be the ideal dining location for nerdy International Relations students like us, as nothing spells “Good Lunch” like eating at Kofi Anan’s cafe. We checked out the views and surrounding areas, and then departed to get nice and close to the…

Israeli-Syrian Border
We arrived at a memorial to the IDF tank crews lost in the area, known as the “Valley of Tears” due to the heavy loss of life during the 1973 October/Yom Kippur War. The memorial is displayed in the photo section, but it is important to note how tense the nearby border really was. On the Israeli side, where we were, we could see an IDF tank dug into a hillside and watching the Syrian side, as well as multiple fortifications dug out and prepared to be manned by any number of nearby reservists. Similarly, there is a UN base of 1200 soldiers in the middle of the two nations, as well as a massive anti-tank ditch to prevent any attempted blitzkrieg by either side.

Here is the only video I took, due to the fact that it was such a windy and overcast day for most of our wonderful trip to the Golan Heights. The area you will see is known as the Valley of Tears, as some of the most fierce fighting between the Israelis and Syrians took place here during the 1973 October/Yom Kippur War. The voice-over you hear is from an informational kiosk on the site of the Israeli Tank Crew Memorial we were visiting. The ruined tank in this footage is a Soviet-built T-56 Main Battle Tank, given to the Syrians and one of the hundreds which participated in the fighting.

Israeli-Lebanese Border
After the visit to the Israeli Tank Crew memorial on the Israeli-Syrian border, we departed for a long drive up to the northern tip of Israel, and the fortified kibbutz near the tip. Unlike the border with Syria or Jordan, the Lebanese border only seemed to be made up of series of parallel fences and then a huge stack of electronic watch-stations all over the place. Similarly, there wasn’t quite as much of a separation of citizens: there were multiple Lebanese villages all quite close to the Israeli kibbutz. As a matter of fact, we were informed that the #1 entry location for dope and other illegal narcotics into Israel is through a city that they share joint custody with the Lebanese government. Check out the photos, each of which have the appropriate caption to explain the situation in a very clear way.

Having shared the amazing series of experiences we had on Sunday, enjoy the photographs I took all day:

Jerusalem – Site of what could have been rioting

After getting back into Jerusalem from our weekend at the Tent of Nations (see the preceding post), Scott and I decided on some delicious Arabic-style chicken and rice. In the Palestinian shuk outside of Damascus Gate, there is a restaurant with amazingly cheap and tasty food.

We sat down and were in the midst of devouring our food when something happened nearby. That sounds really imprecise, but then reread the preceding while keeping in mind that I am in Jerusalem, the most sought-after piece of real estate for most of history, thus “happened” refers to a BIG problem arose. There were, as per usual, something like 7 Palestinian folks who illegally parked their cars in front of the restaurant, and were visiting people in the shuk (for example, one of them was the uncle of the guy who was our waiter in the cafe). This time, some Israeli police officers decided to ticket them as they were impeding pedestrian traffic and were in violation of the law.

What happened next was very quick, and quite frightening actually. The shorter of the two cops started antagonizing one of the car owners while starting to write the ticket, and the gentleman shoved the cop, really hard. Instantly, three Palestinian men held the cop back, and four Palestinians held the car owner back, preventing any sort of fight (that’s correct, Palestinian men actively protected the safety of an Israeli police officer who was hassling one of their countrymen – this is an impossibility if you believe the reports of the mainstream media, but when was the last time they presented anything accurately?). At the same moment, the taller cop bolted from the scene, with his shoved- and shorter- compatriot running soon thereafter. They wanted to avoid causing a fight, it seemed…

…at least for 3 minutes, which is about how long it took for a police van with 6 IDF soldiers to arrive and assemble near the cars and Palestinians. The cops came over and started to argue with the Palestinian drivers, who were with maybe 10 of their friends. Something then happened, which I can honestly tell you signals the first time I have felt genuine fear while I have been in Israel. That small group of Palestinians (lets put them at 20 originally) was INSTANTLY a a crowd of 60 or more Palestinian men, arrayed against 6 IDF soldiers and the original 2 police officers joined by 2 more cops who were nearby. I have seen this sort of thing happen in movies, where it is shot so that a crowd seems to come from nowhere, but my seat at the table was oriented towards the altercation, and I honestly don’t understand where those people came from. It was a quiet evening and the shuk was starting to close, and suddenly, Palestinian guys came from a place I don’t fully understand (the crowd literally materialized before my eyes, without any clear point of origin for individuals joining the crowd). They seemed to be peaceful, but showing their support for the drivers (getting a ticket is a bit stressful, so when 6 fully-armed Israeli soldiers have drawn weapons, I can imagine that support is desirable). I wasn’t afraid of the crowd for myself (many Palestinian people are very nice folks, just like many people in Israel and everywhere else), but for the Israelis and Palestinians involved. I would have photographs of this, but Scott correctly advised me against it – this sort of situation is one that is guaranteed to end with the police confiscating any cameras they saw, and I don’t have the money to purchase a new one.

Thank God that cooler heads prevailed, and the Palestinian drivers admitted that they were in the wrong and thus accepted the tickets (although from the looks of it, several of them got ticketed for failing to cooperate with the police as well). I just wanted to post this anecdote as a reminder to everyone that as great as Israel/Palestine can be, there is an undercurrent of resentment on both sides, which can easily find an outlet in the most seemingly mundane situations (people get ticketed every day, as it turns out).

Bethlehem – Tent of Nations

Arrival
This past Friday, Scott and I departed Mt. Scopus for a weekend spent in the West Bank. Specifically, we were going to visit and work at the Tent of Nations, an organization mentioned to me by my friend Tyler Haugar from LWF. I had called ahead and requested the opportunity to stay for one night and work there, and experience the difficulties of life therein. As a bit of background, the current owner of the land is named Dohar, and his grandfather Bishara purchased the hill and surrounding 100 acres of land decades ago. Like, he purchased the land so long ago, and they loved the land so much that the original ownership papers are from the Ottoman Empire; they got their ownership verified by the Palestinian Mandate, and thus have British ownership paper; they even got their ownership validated by Jordan during its control of the area, and thus have Jordanian ownership papers as well. All of that said, one of the hills on that plot of land is now a Jewish settlement, and there are 3 other settlements around Dohar’s hill, slowly encroaching on his land (and other Palestinian land as well). Beyond merely taking part of his land without asking, paying, or even mentioning it to him, the Jewish settlers have successfully petitioned the Israeli government to forbid Dohar from building any structure (including tents or greenhouses) on his hill, citing “security reasons.” Being the peaceful, law-abiding citizen type, Dohar and his extended family took this matter to court, bringing three generations and three ruling governments’ worth of ownership papers.

Their case has been in the Israeli court system for 17 years, and the settlements have all grown quite large in the intermediate time.

The introduction to the situation aside, Scott and I arrived in Bethlehem and took a sherut (shared taxi) towards Hebron, as I had been told to do. We asked the driver to let us off at Kilo 17, to which he looked slightly incredulous but agreed to do so. We drove for a little while, and eventually I noticed a bunch of brand-new Israeli flags hanging from some of the light posts, hung in celebration of Independence Day (although since we were in the Palestinian West Bank, an odd and grating sight). Just as it dawned on me that the exit on the right must be settlements, the driver pulled over and told us we had arrived. We got out, and went up onto the older, beat-up asphalt road (the one not leading to a Patriarch’s Way settlement, which was our first clue). Check out the photos for a comparative look at the quality of the roads (a seemingly small detail, but very indicative of the differing economic situations there).

We walked through some settler-imposed roadblocks (huge stones), and eventually walked up an incline to the white gate I had been told to expect. I called Dihan, the sister-in-law of Dohar, the owner of the land, and he came down to let us in. He greeted us as though we were well-known and close friends, and led us inside onto his lands for the tour.

The Tour
Dohar then proceeded to take us all over his land, showing us the various caves, the few buildings, and everything in between. As I took the time to carefully label the photographs, they do a great job of showing off the area (all of them labeled “Getting to know the area” are what I am referring to here).

One of my favorite parts of the tour was coming to a small area planted with wheat. Dohar explained that he plants it to feed his goats, and therefore doesn’t have to weed the area – they eat all of it. This short explanation instantly reminded me of one of my favorite sermons from St. Paul’s, by Pastor Tom Omholt. The sermon was on the Parable of the Wheat Field, and discussed the fact that the weeds mentioned in the parable aren’t the usual American connotation of “weeds.” In Palestine and Israel, there is a species of pesky weeds which happen to look exactly like wheat, and so what Jesus has to say makes a bunch more sense; one truly cannot judge other people effectively, as every person essentially will seem the same to human eyes (the good and the bad, all hidden together). It was a neat experience to see what Pastor Tom had mentioned on a winter Sunday in Washington, DC in real life, on a hill in Palestine.

Dohar is an incredibly nice man, and had two very short but very meaningful and powerful statements among the rest of his explanation during the tour. First, he told us an anecdote of the time when the Israeli government began constructing the Wall between Israel and the West Bank. He was by one of the construction sites, and asked one of the workers “why are you building this huge wall??” The answer given was “the [Israeli] government told us we have to, so we are building it.” Dohar isn’t the revolutionary type, as you may have already gathered, so his response is so telling of his world view: he merely requested “that you leave a small window in the wall right here, so I can keep talking to my Israeli friends sometimes.” Unfortunately for everyone involved, that suggested small window was left out of the final implementation of the wall. The other story he told us was when he finally convinced some of the Orthodox Jewish men from the 20,000-person settlement to come visit his hill and see how hard his life is when he is forbidden to improve his land further with additional buildings. He explained to them truthfully that he “has ownership papers for his land from three successive governments,” and would like to be able to work on it in peace. The response his neighbors gave him is the most concise summary of the situation in Israel/Palestine I have ever heard; one of the Orthodox Jews responded “yes that is true, but we have papers from God.” One begins to see just how deeply-rooted this conflict is, with people’s formative, religious world views coming into conflict with other people’s legal and traditional understanding of the area.

Service Project 1 – Uncovering the Grape Vines
We were given gloves and some spades, and set off for our first project: we had to go into a fairly overgrown field, find the grape vines amidst the brush, and then clear the land around them, encouraging them to live and thrive. We started working, and the field must have sensed this; my eyes started to burn, my sinuses starting working overtime, and my legs and arms had a bunch of hives all over them; I was seriously allergic to something on that hill. Nevertheless, being the Simply Push Onwards type, we kept working and talking and joking. We eventually cleared a lot of the brush away, removing the bigger rocks that we found, and cleaned up the area. That was one of the first places I have been where rocks are so plentiful that they simply sit in a broken state above the ground, waiting to twist one’s ankle

Early to Bed…
Having worked hard and enjoyed the sights on and around Dohar’s land, we sat down for a delicious dinner. We had the quintessential Palestinian fresh tea (because after a few hours of hard labor in the sun, nothing spells refreshing like Hot Tea, right?), and then a vegetable stew over rice and salad. It was all delicious, and by 7 PM Scott and I were already really tired. On the other hand, we knew that we didn’t want to be awake at 4 AM due to sleeping too early, so we played a couple of card games (including War, which was 1) ironic given our location; and 2) an awful choice, as that infernal game never ends). We eventually went to sleep, anticipating a thoroughly busy day on the morrow.

…Early to Rise
We got up nice and early on Saturday, with my allergy-induced inability to breath/snoring waking Scott at about 5:15 AM and keeping me in and out of sleep all night long, so I was awake at something like 6 AM. We had a fresh hard-boiled egg (like, an egg laid during the night and boiled in the morning, and by far the BEST egg I have ever eaten) and then the requisite pita and hot tea. We went over by the underground barn and prepared ourselves for…

Service Project 2 – Installing the Drainage System
We were given THE BOSCH-HAMMER (always capitalized as it is the name brand jackhammer that utterly destroyed my wrists and fingers over the course of 7 hours) and brief instruction as to the ideal method for breaking and then clearing the stone-laden dirt. We started working… and we continued working, and working, and working. Eventually, we got to celebrate what is officially my first tea time ever – hot tea, cane sugar, and cold corn on the cob under the shade of a tree, on a hill in Bethlehem **cue Disney movie**.

In between working on the drainage system, we also had lunch (more of the leftovers from dinner, which was still quite tasty), and then helped with the tractor. Specifically, we pushed it up a 15 degree incline, with trailer attached, in order to allow it to roll downhill slightly, starting the manual transmission motor. THAT was hard work, especially as our “warm-up” for it was jackhammering for 3 hours. We climbed into the trailer, and rode over to one of the fields for another first… we went rock harvesting. We simply climbed down from the trailer and picked up any number of reddish rocks, on the ground as if strewn there by God and left until Saturday. The rocks were then used by Dohar’s friend Abdun to line the sides of the underground barn (to see all of this, check out the photographs).

Near the end of the day, Dohar’s son Bishara (named for his great-grandfather) came by and visited us. He is a student at Bethlehem University, and is studying Information Technology. He asked to film Scott and I as part of a video project highlighting the role of volunteers in helping to protect Palestinian land from settlers; I am not the jump in on any side with words type (I prefer using actions to help those people who need it, and avoiding the mire of ill-informed political “sides”), so I was filmed explaining the drainage system we were doing, and Scott gave the more political explanation of why he was there (that is his specialty, after all). At some point, there may be a Youtube video posted here of said video, and I am also invited to tour the campus of Bethlehem University with Bishara, which I will probably do (and later post here about).

Departure
After a thoroughly satisfying, exhausting, enjoyable, and informative weekend experience, Scott and I trudged our way back to the highway. 2 of Dohar’s dogs followed us most of the way, until we started to wonder when they would turn back. In fact, they started to follow us across the multi-lane highway, and even though they are old and tired, 1) cars stopped and didn’t hit them; and 2) they eventually turned around and returned to their home. Having avoided the deaths of those dogs, we achingly climbed into a sherut and started home.

Finally, before the photograph gallery (which took me forever to caption, so please enjoy all of it), I just want to encourage you to check out the website run for Dohar, here. He personally asked that I pass the word on to other people, and I am doing do by posting my own reactions, plus the link to his blog. Please let me know if you’re interested in going, and I will do whatever I can to answer your questions about a potential visit.

Honors Field Trip #1 – Science Museum

Last Thursday, the Honors program took us to the Bloomfield Science Museum in Jerusalem, as part of the semester’s theme of creativity. We took a chartered bus over to the museum, which is across the street from the other Hebrew University Givat Ram campus.

Arriving, we instantly noticed that we were the oldest people present to tour the museum by at least 9 years, which was slightly offsetting. We eventually made our way into the museum, and met our British tour guide. We started off the afternoon with logical puzzles, requiring us to solve problems of making several smaller non-uniform shapes into a bigger one (randomly-shaped pieces of wood into the letter ‘T’ for example), which my buddy Keenan and I were all over. For me personally, it was a pleasant and unexpected immersion back into Program Challenge (PC) from elementary school, and thus the day instantly became more enjoyable.

We got to tour much of the museum in terms of exhibitions, and got the much more intensive explanations from our guide, with a focus on creativity. It is a science museum, so most of it isn’t necessarily worth mentioning, but there was one odd point in the first part of the tour: the one exhibit was a series of different metals, with a low voltage and amperage current flowing through it to allow people to connect the circuits with their arms and see how much electricity was passing through them. The other people around me were getting readings of about 35/-35 from the meter, whereas my completing the circuit was literally off the scale (which only went up to 90/-90). Apparently, I am Iron Man.

The high point of the tour was the linguistic portions, as our guide is a student of linguistics and it fascinates me personally. We did an activity where he read a real word in English and then everyone had to try and write the proper definition. “Psychopomp” ended up meaning “a device used to send souls to the afterlife in the ancient world.” “Merinome” ended up referring to “the midpoint between two objects” (and not some sort of reference to Hobbits). We also did an activity where 9 pictures represented 9 ideas/things, and then a speaker read them out randomly in a random language, and we had to guess what was being referred to. Things like a cat, ice cream, and a symbol for needing help (a hand reaching out of water) were read and our best was 7 out of 9. We then had to solve the same images using a language called Bliss, which has been developed to use symbols to describe ideas and words in a way that would make sense to a child (and is used to help kids who have been sexually abused talk about their situation).

Finally, we got to do one last linguistics game, which involved a few volunteers. Each person stood up at the front of the group, and then our guide selected three obtuse words from several lists. He also randomly selected a background story, and then the volunteer had to instantly embark on an improvised tale which started with the short background tale, and then worked in the obtuse words. The object of the game was for the rest of the group to try and guess which of the words were forced into the story, by paying attention to body language and verbal cues from the person speaking. I volunteered, and my story had to include “radishes,” “igloo,” and “Camembert.” My background story was, somewhat ideally, that I was at dinner with my boss and he introduced a young lady eating with us as his daughter. I got up and gripped the podium (can’t have any shaking of the hands when it comes to stealth insertion of words into stories, can we), and started off with my tale of woe and renewal; of danger and regained safety; of cliches and original content. That introduction aside, my story basically turned into a purported anecdote of all the places I have been able to dine, as I allegedly relayed to the daughter. This allowed me to work in radishes as part of the salads being offered, and Camembert as an accoutrement. Igloo was the most difficult to work in, and thus I made the snap decision to explain that my various dining places have included boats in the ocean, tiki huts on islands, mudbrick homes in Africa, and even igloos in the Arctic. How did I do? I am happy to report that no one was able to guess all three of the words I had to put into my story, but a few people were able to guess two (igloo being one of them, as that is a fairly obvious candidate for not belonging in most sentences).

All in all, it was an entertaining day.

Check out a few sample photographs taken by Mr. Kaplan, of the HU faculty:

Keenan, Angela, and I, having successfully completed the Da Vinci bridge riddle:

Yours truly, arguing about something (Mr. Kaplan is a good candid photographer):

The Honors group, and some invited guests, all looking on as our British guide explained how optical illusions go about fooling one’s eyes:

Go check out the other photographs taken that day, all by taken by Mr. Yonatan Kaplan of the Hebrew University (and posted here with his explicit permission), at this site.