A week ago, I returned to the United States after visiting Israel. That trip included a one-day holy land tour (Jerusalem and Bethlehem). Since that time, I’ve been pondering how to capture my thoughts. I’ve come to the conclusion that I should just start writing and see what happens. I’ll roughly follow the pictures which can be found here, but I’ll probably jump off on lots of tangents along the way. 🙂
Before we start, I have to pass on a recommendation for this map. It’s a really cool interactive map which has quite a bit of detail for Jerusalem. If you’re interested in the geography that goes along with this story, the map will be very helpful.
I picked the trip up on days off which was good for some extra Christmas spending money. That was particularly good given the fact I had two cancellations this month which cost me several days of work. We don’t get paid for cancellations (some pilots do), so it would have been a pretty lousy month without the extra pay. The customer is Israir who apparently either needed extra capacity or maybe had an airplane in check. Some passengers mentioned that the service was usually operated with a 767.
The flight from JFK to Tel Aviv was just under 11 hours block time and I flew that leg. I was able to get some rest in the bunk which was much needed (it was a red-eye). During the preflight and the flight there was some discussion about taking a tour while we were on our layover. By the time we arrived at the hotel, there were 10 people who indicated an interest in the tour. It was ~$45 per person and left the next morning at 8:00 a.m. Sleep wasn’t all that great that night.
I managed to sneak in some breakfast before meeting for the tour (continental, good food, mostly or entirely locally made, I think). We wound up with 9 people going (two no-shows and one addition). We met our driver / tour guide, Elie (pronounced more like al-leE as I recall). He spoke pretty good English and had a good sense of humor. His speech had a kind of quaint, colorful foreignness to it. We had asked to tour the Christian sites and he presumably knew that, being Americans, the group was predominantly Christian (even if only nominally in some cases). I didn’t ask if he had a particular religious persuasion and he didn’t really tell.
We started out driving towards Jaffa, which is the historic port city out of which Tel Aviv grew. Based on his description of the history of Tel Aviv, I got the impression there were undertones of superiority over the predominantly Arab Jaffa. This theme would repeat itself as I listened to his descriptions of both the Israeli and Arab settlements along the way to Jerusalem. To be fair, he did point out seemingly balanced examples of nicer and not-so-nice housing in both Israeli and Arab settlements, but he seemed subtly approving of the former and less so of the latter. Of course, those were just my impressions…
For the rest of the hour-long drive to Jerusalem, we enjoyed the scenery and his descriptions of the features along the way. He mentioned that the natural state of the land is more barren and that they have planted over 250,000,000 (250 Million) trees in Israel. Indeed, there were a lot of trees there and they appeared to grow (once planted) fairly readily. He mentioned that they even have trains in Israel (we saw one on the way).
He mentioned that in many or maybe all of the Arab settlements, they are no longer allowed to drive their cars into Israel. This is because of the car bombings. They aren’t forbidden from having cars, they just can’t go anywhere with them. So they block off the roads and if someone living in a Palestinian settlement wants to go (to work, for example) in the Jewish part, they have to get a ride from the road block. One such settlement which we drove by along the way is Ramallah, the ‘unofficial’ Palestinian capital where Yasser Arafat had his headquarters and is buried.
We saw many walls along the way, mostly erected within the last few years. Elie’s explanation was that the militant Palestinians would shoot at the Israeli settlements, or come in perform other terrorist attacks. The walls, part of the West Bank Barrier, separate the Israeli and Palestinian areas.
At the end of our controversial drive, we wound up at the Mount of Olives, mentioned many times in the Bible. From here, we had some amazing views of the old city. Though it’s far more populated now, the outline of the old city was clearly visible. Even in Christ’s time, it must have been quite a sight to behold. From there, we drove down towards the south gate. On the way, we drove by the Church of Gethsemane, believed to be located at the Garden of Gethsemane where the New Testament indicates Jesus prayed after the Last Supper.
To be continued…
V-