We’re grilling kosher hot dogs and dipping into what’s been dubbed “the best hummus in Israel” when we cautiously turn the talk to politics. It’s the first chance I’ve had to see the full spectrum of Israeli public opinion sitting around the same picnic table. Avi – a soft-spoken student with a flair for the philosophical – shows sympathy for the Palestinians; David – sharp and cynical, his eyes twinkling with mischief – ardently defends the extreme security measures of the state. When someone mentions the suffering in Gaza and the West Bank, he grimaces and snuffs,

“Yeah, it’s terrible. It’s worse than Auschwitz.”

It’s a loaded statement: provocative and insensitive and almost entirely missing the point. But he’s launched himself into the debate the way Star Jones might launch herself into a ham sandwich, and it’s clear that in a group of left-leaners – Israelis and otherwise – David’s taken up the cause of the right, even if he’s flying the flag on his own.

He’s also proving himself to be a semantic assassin. When I ask about the wall dividing Jerusalem from the West Bank, he’s quick to point out that “it’s not a wall, it’s a fence.” Only small parts of it, after all, are an actual wall. Later he’ll grow flustered when someone criticizes the Israeli “bombing” of Jenin, in the West Bank.

“It wasn’t bombing,” he says. “There were no airplanes, there were no bombs. It was only tanks; they were shelling. There’s a big difference.”

It’s the sort of argument you’re not likely to find outside of Israel or a war-crimes trial in the Hague. Though the difference between a fence and a wall, a bomb and a shell, is undoubtedly more than just splitting hairs, you get the feeling it’s the sort of distinction that carries different implications depending on which side of the shell or fence you’re sitting on. Some of the group are getting agitated; things are growing tense and threatening to derail an otherwise pleasant day. And while I suggest “shelled the shit out of” as a worthy compromise – drawing some grudging acquiescence all around – there’s an acknowledgment that we’re better off turning the talk back to less treacherous terrain, whether it’s the beaches of Malaysia, the mountains of Rajasthan, or the waistline of the still-comatose Ariel Sharon.

But it’s hard to brush aside the implications behind all the rhetoric; they are, after all, at the very root of modern Israel’s conundrum. This is a country whose leading English-language daily, Haaretz, has full sections of its newspaper devoted to “Diplomacy” and “Defense.” It’s a country that’s watched anxiously as an Iranian president intent on wiping it off the map pursues a nuclear bomb. It’s seen Islamic groups who refuse to recognize its right to exist gaining popular support – and political legitimacy – in both Lebanon (Hizbollah) and Gaza (Hamas). And it’s dealt with the existential dilemma of what it means to be a modern Jewish state – a dilemma that frames every debate from the rise of secularism versus religious Orthodoxy, to whether a nation itself built by refugees should open its doors to refugees fleeing genocide in Sudan, to how the demographic shift of the next century – which could see Israel’s Jews becoming a minority in their own country – will change the political and ideological landscape.

For the past two weeks, while the country’s celebrated the 40th anniversary of its victory in the Six-Day War, these are the questions being asked on the Op-Ed pages of Haaretz and The Jerusalem Post. Israel’s identity crisis is acute, and adding to its list of anxieties is the sense that its young are too fed up with “Defense” and too cynical about “Diplomacy” to look with hope toward the future. About the only thing everyone can agree on – Jews and Arabs, young and old – is that things are going nowhere fast. And here, in Jerusalem, where a hypothetical wall between the Arab East and Jewish West is as tangible as the “separation fence” itself, all the strains of the Middle East are tugging on a daily basis.

And the city’s wounds are endless. Walking along Jaffa St. with Avi and David – good friends in spite of their political differences – they point out site after site scarred during the last intifada: a Sbarro’s pizzeria packed with families and gangly teens; a bus route – No. 6 – that was bombed three times in the same week; a plaza where a young Jewish girl was torn apart by an explosion, and where a small concrete fountain now gurgles in the shade. On almost every street there’s some grim recollection of that bloody period, and it’s not hard to see why David would feel inclined to point out,

“Since they built the fence, there hasn’t been a single bombing in Jerusalem. Not one.”

Yet even he admits that the fence is just a Band-Aid on a very big wound, and that the security it offers comes at the cost of more hopeless, desperate Palestinians. But the alternatives seem equally unpalatable. He recites a favorite mantra of the right: that where Israel’s given ground, it’s only been bitten in the end. The pull-out from Lebanon in 2000, which led to Hizbollah’s subsequent arms build-up and, eventually, last year’s war; the withdrawal from Gaza, which has brought a rain of Qassam missiles down on Sderot in the south, along with the power grab that has Israeli pundits labeling the Gaza Strip “Hamastan.” It’s a very different argument from the one I’ve heard for the past few months – in the cafés of Cairo, in the bombed-out villages of southern Lebanon – but among these young Israelis, it seems to ring with the same truth. So what can Israel – what can anyone do?

It’s not surprising what the inherited wisdom is in the Middle East: that you sit and sigh and wring your hands, waiting for the next bomb to blow.]]> TravelGator http://www.travelgator.com/do/blogs/TravelinGator Mon, 11 Jun 2007 12:00:00 EDT

I’m spending a few days with Yair and Danielle, a young CouchSurfing couple living in Nahloat – a pretty neighborhood of stone houses and sunny courtyards and narrow, flower-filled lanes. On my first day Yair takes me into the Old City, with the late-afternoon sunlight bathing the ramparts. We walk through the cluttered souvenir stalls of David Street, past Arab kids kicking soccer balls and dangling from shoddy scaffolding, turning down blind alleys until we’re suddenly upon the Western Wall. There are dozens of men in black hats and long coats, women in chaste, ankle-length skirts, their hair tightly swaddled. You get the sense that these pious, trembling souls – standing on the spot from which Judaism’s holiest temple once rose – are still communing with the spirits of antiquity. The white-haired heads bobbing and jerking, the low drone of prayer filling the air. A man approaches with leather straps that he proceeds to wrap around Yair’s forearm – we’ve arrived just in time to “lay tefillin” – and in the movements of his pale hands and his stooped shoulders, there’s a suggestion of rites so grave and archaic that even my best Jackie Mason impersonation wouldn’t crack a smile across his solemn mug.

But this hallowed ground is also home to some high-holy hucksters – fast-talking guys with shifty eyes who nervously tug at the tzitzit dangling beneath their coats. They make hard-luck appeals, though some are wearing fancy wristwatches worth a good deal more than the loose shekel jangling around in my pocket. One even makes a plaintive case that I’d be doing a mitzvah – something that, to a guy who doesn’t know better, sounds a bit like what might happen if you ate too much cabbage at Bubbie’s Buffet and Kosher Kitchen.

Even the old-timers are getting into the act. It’s hard to tell if these are beggars or hustlers or a combination of the two: men who have turned so many cons they’re starting to fool themselves. You look past those marvelous, crow’s-nest beards and Old-World rabbinical clothes, and in the wry, wrinkled eyes is a look that’s so New York you can practically serve it with a schmear.

Sure enough, once they’ve tried their luck in Hebrew and failed to wring so much as a “shalom” out of me, they hit me with an accented English that’s more Boro Park than Be’er Sheva. One man approaches with a slow, solemn gait, a black hat resting heavily on his brow. He has broad, square shoulders and a long gray beard that tapers to a point above his chest. You can almost picture him as a minor figure in the Old Testament: Solomon the tinkerer or Abraham the blacksmith, who spaketh thusly against the Lord, and got a locust-plague’s worth of whoop-ass unleashed upon his household. But there’s a playfulness about his eyes, a suggestion that he’s the first one to break out the dreidel once the kids have gathered on Hannukah Eve. He asks me where I’m from.

“New York,” I say.

“Which part?”

“Brooklyn.”

“Which part?” he asks again. You can tell the old guy’s gotten a lot of mileage out of this schtick. “You think an old Jew doesn’t know New York?” is sort of implicit in the questioning. I tell him my neighborhood, right down to the block, and he nods sagely. “Where were you in 1972?” he asks, almost accusatory, as if I’d left him standing at the altar. I admit I wasn’t so much as a bump in my mother’s womb.

“I was on the corner of 86th Street and Central Park West,” he says. “I was sitting on a bench and picking my nose in the rain, and I had people from all around the world coming to see me. Allen Ginsberg was worshiping at my feet. Gabe Pressman and Connie Chung” – two pillars of New York media, it should be noted – “interviewed me for Channel 2 news.”

“Wow,” I observe, then adding, “Huh!”

“You can find my books on Amazon.com. I’ve written five books, and people write to me from all around the world, ‘This is incredible! You’ve changed my life!’ From Germany, Japan.”

I tell him that I’m also a writer and he points a finger in my face. “How many books?” When I tell him none, he wrinkles his nose with distaste. “Then you’re not really a writer,” he says. I wonder why he has to be such a dick about it. When I tell him I write for a travel website – and get paid for the privilege – he pauses to reconsider. Finally, grudgingly, he concedes, “Well that’s not so bad, then.” I agree and thank him for his time, suspecting that he was worth a whole lot more veneration in the days when he kept his mouth shut.

After the pandemonium of the Western Wall, the kosher chaos of the shouk, I’m hardly prepared for my first shabat in Jerusalem. The city’s wheels grind to a halt on Friday afternoon, and by nightfall the streets have emptied. A few packs of teens sulk around Zion Square; the crosswalk signals click-clack like metronomes, though there’s hardly a pedestrian in sight. The next day, slogging through the heat past rows of shuttered shops, I’m greeted by a hot wind that seems to be blowing desolation itself through the streets.

And yet there are signs of life, even if you have to cock your ear to catch them. You can hear the clatter of dishes from open windows, the familiar tumult of families gathered around the dinner table. I’m reminded of Sunday afternoons in my old Italian neighborhood back home: the clanging of cookery, the domestic clamor, boisterous voices rising and spilling out onto the street. Briefly I feel something surging in my breast – a note of longing, its timbre pure as a church bell’s – though whether it’s a pang for home or for a nice hunk of schwarma, I’m not entirely sure.

Quickly I’ve discovered why the locals went scurrying to the market on Friday morning, stocking up on canned goods and rugalah the way the rest of us brace for hurricanes back home. The streets are empty, the shouk is empty – an impressive sight, given the Orthodox bedlam that was unleashed here just 24 hours ago. I turn onto Agrippas and again onto Ben Yehuda – the pedestrian promenade that was swelling with pre-teens when I saw it on Thursday night – and apart from a pair of young lovers and a homeless guy muttering into his beard, the place is deserted.

Things are beginning to take a turn for the Biblical. I’m reminded of the exodus from Egypt, of a certain wandering tribe roaming the scorched sands in search of the Promised Land. A powerful, empathic wave shakes me; though hardly Jewish, I feel – if only for this luckless shabat – somewhat Jew…ish. At my favorite falafel haunts on King George and Jaffa, I’m thrice denied. “Hast thou taken us away to die in the wilderness?” Only after a fruitless hour do I see a convenience store shining in the distance, its crammed aisles promising sweet, chocolatey salvation. And on my way back to Nahloat, fattened on peanuts and nougat, I’m making mental notes to hit the shouk with religious fervor before braving another shabat.]]> TravelGator http://www.travelgator.com/do/blogs/TravelinGator Mon, 04 Jun 2007 12:00:00 EDT

There’s an easy-going air about Haifa, a sort of casual prosperity that, you suspect, owes much to the university sitting at the top of the hill. Around Carmel Center, with its cafés and falafel shops and late-night noodle joints, the college kids are out in force: guys in frayed jeans and rumpled t-shirts, girls in flip-flops and short-shorts and oversized baseball caps resting low on their smooth foreheads. It’s a scene not unfamiliar from any American college town, a whiff of earnestness and tireless procrastination, coupled with the suspicion that mom and dad are footing the bill.

I take to this town from the start, as much for the lazy days of free WiFi and bottomless coffee as the broad expanses of leg being flashed at every turn. It’s here, in sunny Haifa, that I’m reacquainted with certain truths of animal longing that millions of years of evolution have created and pop fashion has honed. “Israeli girls are so fucking hot,” is how I put it in an email to a friend, an observation that – coarseness aside – seems to tidily sum up the situation at hand.

I’m reacquainted with casual flirtation, too, a near-forgotten pastime that I’m pursuing around town with democratic vigor. I’m reminded of the baroque measures some of my Arab friends had to go through to meet girls, the parental petitions and social constraints that gave a simple cup of coffee all the gravity of a war-crimes tribunal. You don’t appreciate the sweet, simple pleasure of flirting with a pretty waitress until you’ve been denied it for months on end. And with apologies to all the fine waiters I’ve encountered in the Middle East – the sparkling eyes, the wisps of moustache, the English they fumbled like a hot potato – there’s no better way to enjoy your falafel than with a whopping side dish of crass innuendo.

Life in Haifa feels improbably normal, in spite of the turbulent Lebanese border just 25 miles to the north, in spite of the ever-bubbling cauldron of Palestinian-Israeli politics. Maybe I was expecting a bit much from this country from the start: more impassioned debate on the street than idle chit-chat in the cafés. But I get the sense that for all the pressure-cooker politics of the region, for all the hostile neighbors that surround it, Israel isn’t entirely unlike the place that I call home.

It’s a fact that’s only confirmed by Tel Aviv – a town that, once you get past the Hebrew traffic signs and kosher Chinese food, could’ve been plucked from the coasts of Southern California. Pretty, twenty-something moms push wide-berth strollers down the street; guys in sleeveless tees flex their muscles on the beach; young girls in skimpy tank-tops bare their taut little tummies. There’s a vigorous optimism around town, coupled with an air of conspicuous consumption that makes the whole city feel like some sort of yuppie fantasia. I’ve come to associate this feeling with the place that I call home – the American in me stretching toward the homeland in the same way that a plant bends toward the sunlight. Sitting at a sidewalk café, surfing the free WiFi and watching the tanned and toned twenty-somethings parade by, I can’t shake the impression that the only difference between Tel Aviv and New York is better beaches and fewer Jews.

It’s also proving to be the perfect base camp before the next leg of my trip, which should be kicking off in Nairobi in two weeks’ time. Shopping in Tel Aviv is as pathologically refined as in its American counterparts, with all the creature comforts of home – name-brand toothpaste, designer jeans and such frisky, over-the-counter classics as “Cum in My Bum” – within arm’s reach. Gearing up for my African adventure is no sweat in a country where high-end hiking gear gets hawked on every street corner and pharmacists unload malaria pills like they were breath mints.

It’s hardly surprising. Young Israelis might be the most well-traveled pack of twenty-somethings on the planet, with most logging thousands of miles in round-the-world airfare after their compulsory army stints. It takes little prodding for them to spill their long, rhapsodic tales of trekking in South America, or getting blitzed off of high-grade weed under a canopy of palm trees in Goa. The irony, of course, is that these same Israelis aren’t nearly so familiar with their own neighbors, with whom diplomatic relations are about as warm as the underside of Ariel Sharon’s pillow. Most are eager to hear about my time in Lebanon and Syria, making weary sighs as I describe the pleasures of Damascus – a city that, just a few hundred miles to the northeast, might as well be Pyongyang. When one young waiter hears my rapturous talk about Lebanon, he recalls his father’s own reports of the country’s scenic beauty. Of course, with a bit of prodding, he admits his dad was visiting as part of an invading army in the ‘80s, and for most Israelis, the only view they’re likely to get of Lebanon is from the cockpit of a fighter jet or the turret of a tank.

After all these months in the Arab world, it’s been revealing to see the Middle East through Israeli eyes. You don’t have to work too hard to get a sense of this country’s afflictions, and the heightened paranoia that comes with the conviction that the barbarians are at the gates. I’ve gotten used to opening my bags at bus stations and shopping malls, or having a security wand waved over my backside in front of a nightclub. The right-wing “Jerusalem Post” reports on the troubles in the south – where Hamas rockets are raining down on the hapless town of Sderot – with something approaching carnal ecstasy. “Don’t you see?” the paper’s tone implies. “They’ll push us into the sea the first chance they get!” For their part, most of the locals in Tel Aviv are happy to go splashing in unprovoked, coming out to dry their long, lithe limbs on the sand.

And who can blame them if they want to treat the warm, lapping waters of the Mediterranean like the river Lethe? It’s easy to see, on the beaches and in the bars, the same reckless pursuit of pleasure that I saw in Beirut – a release from the pressure cooker of life in the Middle East. Sitting on the beach, surrounded by tanned girls roasting and turning in the sand like chickens on a spit, I’m swept up by my own sweet oblivion. Then a guy in a stars-and-stripes Speedo breaks the reverie, his hands on his hips and – for lack of a better description – his flag at full-mast. It’s all I can do not to sweep up the young children and shuttle them to safety, or to take my cue from the poor, afflicted souls of Sderot, hustling them into the nearest shelter, safe from the terrible onslaught of this engorged, incoming missile.]]>