by Barry, Dave
However, I come from a long line of WASPs. Our tradition is to pay full price, then get revenge by starting an exclusive country club. I hate bargaining, and I am terrible at it. Also, forty shekels is around eleven dollars, which to me seems very reasonable for the sandals. So I say OK to the man and hand him a hundred-shekel bill. It is only after we have walked back to our hotel that I realize two things:
(1) The sandals are defective.
(2) He actually charged me eighty shekels for them. Apparently, when I held up the sandal, he quoted me a price for just that one sandal, as if he believed I planned to hop around the Middle East on just the one foot.
I consider marching back to Jaffa and confronting the sandal man or—this would be truer to my heritage—building a golf course and refusing to let him play there. But it’s getting late and we have to meet for dinner with the rest of our tour group, which totals twenty-five people. We eat at a restaurant featuring cuisine from Yemen (National motto: “Even We Don’t Know Where It Is”). The dinner is delicious. If for some reason that I cannot personally imagine you ever find yourself in Yemen, my recommendation is: Try the food.
DAY TWO
We start at the hotel with an “Israeli-style” breakfast buffet, which is a vast array of fresh salads, fruits, vegetables, fish, breads, cereals, cheeses and on and on and on. Israelis take food very seriously. This is another area where Jews and WASPs differ. Your typical Protestant breakfast buffet consists of a dense mass of scrambled eggs that could have been scrambled during the Clinton administration; for side dishes there will be bacon, potatoes and—for variety—some other kind of potatoes.
After breakfast we lumber outside and board our tour bus. Finally, after months of planning and anticipation, we are setting out on our tour of Israel. There is a feeling of excitement, almost giddiness, among the members of our group, because it turns out that the bus has wifi.
Our first stop is Independence Hall, the building in central Tel Aviv, where, on May 14, 1948, with the ruling British about to pull out of what was then called Palestine—an unstable mixture of Arabs and Jews—Israel declared itself to be an independent state. Almost immediately the new nation was attacked by Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt. Basically, the Israelis were fighting all their Arab neighbors at once; it’s amazing that that hostile Arab jellyfish didn’t crawl out of the Mediterranean and start stinging them.
Israel won that war and survived, but there were more wars in 1956, 1967 and 1973, as well as many other periods of violent conflict, continuing right up until today. Generally the way these conflicts go is . . .
WARNING! WARNING! WARNING!
GROSS OVERSIMPLIFICATION OF COMPLEX ISSUE AHEAD
. . . Israel, which has a kickass army, wins the conflict and in the process captures a bunch of new territory. Then, after international pressure and lengthy negotiations, there is some kind of historic peace agreement, which usually involves Israel giving at least some of the captured territory back. This agreement is traditionally signed in the presence of whoever happens to be the president of the United States, whose traditional role is to beam ecstatically over the proceedings as though he is at that moment being serviced by an intern. This is followed by a lasting peace that lasts anywhere from fifteen to twenty minutes. Then there is conflict again.
A major source of the conflict is the issue of what to do about the Palestinian Arabs, who want—not without reason—to have their own nation on territory that Israel currently controls. Polls show that most Israelis would be willing to give up land if it meant there would be permanent peace; the concern is that there would not be peace and that a diminished Israel—which even in its current incarnation is about the width of a regulation volleyball court—would be less able to defend itself from its enemies, some of whom have made it clear that the only kind of peace they want with Israel is the kind the Death Star wanted with the Planet Alderaan.
So security is a very, very big issue for Israelis, even bigger than food. They know that any day could be the day another war starts. Most young Israelis, men and women, serve in the army. (The exception is the ultra-Orthodox, who generally do not serve in the army, a fact that causes a lot of resentment.) Everywhere you go, you see teenagers in uniform carrying assault rifles, which they never set down, even when they’re eating. I had mixed reactions to this. On the one hand, I’d think: We’re safe because there are all these soldiers around. On the other hand, I’d think: Wait a minute: Why are all these soldiers around?
But getting back to our tour of Independence Hall: The highlight is an emotional talk about the birth and desperate early struggles of Israel, given by a tough Israeli woman guide—she shushes a boisterous group of American college students and they shut right up—in the room where Israel’s independence was declared. At the end of her talk, she plays a recording of Israel’s founding father and first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, proclaiming the establishment of the Jewish independent state, his voice being broadcast to the new nation via the microphone that still sits today on the long table at the front of the room. Then we stand, and those who know the words sing the Israeli national anthem, “Hatikvah” (“The Hope”). At this point, Michelle is (1) bawling and (2) ready to join the Israeli army. She would serve in the elite Shopping Corps.
After leaving Independence Hall, we travel to a town just outside Tel Aviv, where we tour a secret munitions factory that was operated from 1946 to 1948 by Haganah, the Zionist paramilitary organization that was fighting for an independent Jewish state when the British controlled Palestine. Haganah could get guns but had trouble obtaining ammunition, so it built an underground factory, hidden beneath the laundry of a kibbutz that was essentially just a front to fool the British. There, forty-five young people, working under harsh and dangerous conditions, manufactured more than two million bullets. Had they been caught, they would have faced the death penalty. It’s a fascinating tour. Some of us don’t even check to see if there’s wifi.
We get back on the bus and head south, into the Negev Desert. Along the way we get some more history from our tour guide, Doron Wilfand, who was born and raised on a kibbutz and served in the army. He graduated from Hebrew University and did postgraduate work in religious studies at Duke, where he developed a taste for American sports, especially pro football, which he knows more about than we do.
Doron is a sweet, patient, compassionate and very smart guy. He is also unbelievably well informed. He does not do tour guide patter. Whatever you ask him about, he gives you a thoughtful, nuanced, nondogmatic and encyclopedically detailed answer, sometimes including personal anecdotes. If you ask him, for example, about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, he’ll give you an articulate twenty-minute argument for the Palestinian position, at the end of which you will feel (if you are me) suddenly pro-Palestinian. But then he will give an equally articulate twenty-minute argument for the Israeli position, and you will feel (if you are me) suddenly very much of two minds. Then he will present a third way of looking at the conflict, and then a fourth, and maybe a fifth, until your brain is throbbing from looking at the issue from so many different perspectives and you realize that the only thing you will ever really understand about the Middle East is that you will never really understand the Middle East.
On the other hand, as far as I can tell, nobody in the Middle East really does, either.
As we drive south, Israel quickly becomes a desert—miles and miles of sunbaked dirt and rocks. There are also occasional roadside camels, which stand around acting as though it is perfectly normal for them to be by the side of the road, as opposed to in a circus.
Finally, we reach our destination, which is a Bedouin camp. The Bedouin are tribal, traditionally desert-dwelling Arabs; there are more than one hundred thousand of them in Israel. They pretty much keep to themselves, but they are Israeli citizens; some of them even join in the Israel Defense Forces, where they serve as trackers.
T
his particular camp is essentially a tourist attraction. You can ride camels there, have a Bedouin-style meal and even spend the night in a tent. There are several busloads of American college students staying in the tents. They’re with Birthright Israel, a nonprofit program that brings Jewish young adults to Israel for free ten-day trips, during which they learn about their cultural and religious heritage. Because they are college students, some of them also take the opportunity (although this is not a formal part of the program) to get hammered.
We are not, thank God, spending the night in tents with the college students. We’re there to ride camels. I am not thrilled about this. I do not enjoy climbing onto the backs of large animals (horses are another example) that have hard feet and could, anytime they wanted, throw me off and stomp me until my skeletal system was the consistency of rice pudding. If I were a camel and hefty American tourists kept climbing onto my back, I would definitely try to kill them. No jury could convict me. I would plead camel.
The Bedouin are operating a camel train, consisting of fifteen camels tied together in a line. Each camel carries two people on a big saddle. The train makes about a fifteen-minute loop, going out into the desert and back. There is no beverage cart service.
Before we board, we receive a short briefing from a Bedouin named Amir, who gives us these instructions:
“Don’t get with food on you on the camel. The camel behind you will try to eat it.”
“Hold on tight. The camels are coming up and down a little bit funny.”
“Don’t pet the camel. They don’t like to be pet.”
“Try to avoid screaming.”
Two Bedouin guys herd the camel train over to our group and make the camels kneel. Michelle and I board the last camel in the train. A Bedouin does something to make the camel stand and, WHOA, Amir was not kidding about coming up funny. It is all I can do to observe the no-screaming rule as we lurch violently upward to a height of (this is an estimate) seventy-five feet.
Then the camel train starts moving and, WHOA, we discover why you never hear camels described as “The Lexus Luxury Sedans of the Desert.” It is not a smooth ride. It’s like a rockin’ and rollin’ amusement park attraction called the Krazy Kamel. We’re going maybe two miles an hour, but Michelle and I are clinging to the saddle like terrified barnacles.
To make matters worse, our camel, which we nickname “Thunderbolt,” has decided that he* no longer wishes to be the last camel in the train. He keeps trying to pass the camel in front of us. Maybe he’s tired of being the fifteenth camel, spending all day schlepping tourists around a loop and staring at the butt of the fourteenth camel. He has ambitions! He wants to move up in life, maybe stare at the butt of the thirteenth camel or even (He can dream, can’t he?) the butt of the twelfth camel.
Whatever the reason, Thunderbolt keeps speeding up to 2.1 miles per hour and attempting to pass. The ropes prevent him from succeeding, but he is not the kind of camel to give up easily, so, as we jounce along, we repeatedly bang into Camel 14. The Bedouin guys don’t seem to notice. Michelle keeps asking me—because naturally, as the husband, I am supposed to be an authority on camel behavior—“Is it supposed to do this?” We are involved in numerous camel collisions as we jolt our way around the loop. We are greatly relieved when we finish and, WHOA, Thunderbolt kneels to let us off. My feeling is if this is how people have been getting around for centuries, no wonder the Middle East is tense.
After the camel ride we go into a big tent, sit on mats on the floor and enjoy a hearty meal featuring a specialty of Bedouin cuisine: Roast Hump.
No, seriously, we did not eat camel. As far as I know. It was dark in the tent.
After dinner we drive to a very nice hotel in a town called Mitzpe, right next to the famous Ramon Crater, which—as you know if, like me, you just looked it up on Wikipedia—is “a large erosion cirque.” Our hotel is perched on a rock ledge overlooking a vast desert valley. From our room, as the sun sets, we can see a dramatic rock cliff plunging straight down a long, lonnnng way to the valley floor. Looking at it, I recall that the tour schedule for tomorrow involves rappelling. But I am sure that there is no way that anybody would expect a bunch of tourist schlubs like us—people from Miami-Dade County, where the highest point, by far, is a landfill—to rappel down this particular cliff. Surely we’ll be using some smaller, wussier cliff, right? Right? This is what is on my mind as the sun goes down.
Fortunately, the hotel has a bar.
DAY THREE
After another traditional 273-course Israeli breakfast, our group climbs into four Land Rovers for a trip into the crater. From the hotel the highway descends through a series of switchbacks about a thousand feet to the crater floor. In a few miles we turn off the road onto a barely there dirt track and start lurching up a steep, rocky hill. There is no vegetation anywhere, just rocks and dirt. The driver tells us we are in what is called extreme desert. He says it gets very hot here, but he gives the temperature in Celsius, so all we hear is a meaningless number such as “fourteen” or “thirty-eight.” We ask him how hot it gets in real degrees and he launches into a brief rant in favor of the metric system, ending with, “You Americans, with the inches and the yards! Grow up!”
After driving upward through a great deal of nothing, we arrive at a high vantage point from which we can see: a whole lot more nothing. We get out of our Land Rovers, and the main crater guide explains where we are.
“You are in the middle of nowhere,” he says. “If you want to live here, you are in trouble.”
We have no desire to live there, but we do take numerous pictures of ourselves standing in front of the nothing in various groupings. Then we pile back into the Land Rovers for a rocky, bouncy drive down a series of tracks and through miles and miles of desert until finally we reach our destination, which is: a tree. I am pretty sure this is the only tree in the Negev Desert. If you look closely at a map of southern Israel and you see a tiny dot labeled “Tree,” that is our location.
We pile out of the Land Rovers again and gather around the guide, who squats by the tree and uses a pile of sand, some bottled water and a stick to demonstrate the geological process that formed the Ramon Crater. As I understand it, what happened was, there was this huge raised area of land that was eroded over millions of years by water being poured from a giant plastic bottle. It occurs to me that the reason why the Negev Desert Tree is located here is that this particular spot has been watered by thousands of tour guide demonstrations.
Before we leave the Negev Desert Tree, we spend a few minutes tossing a football—one of the families brought it along—with the drivers. They’re not sure how to throw it, but they have seen enough NFL on TV to perfectly mimic a quarterback hunching over a center and barking out nonsensical sounds. One of the drivers says: “What’s up with the Dolphins? No Dan Marino?”
Even in the middle of nowhere, we can’t escape the pain.
After the crater tour there is an optional tour of an alpaca farm. I don’t really know what “alpacas” are and I don’t want to run the risk that they’re anything like camels, so I pass on the tour. This is a decision I will come to regret because if I had gone to the alpaca farm and an alpaca had decided to stomp me to death, I would have gotten out of participating in the next scheduled tour activity, which is: rappelling.
We walk from the hotel to the rappelling site, which turns out to be the very same cliff that I observed the night before from the hotel room: the Cliff of Death. I seriously would like to get out of this—I’m afraid of heights—but I can’t think of a manly way to back down in front of my daughter, who thinks this is a great idea. I reassure myself with the thought that the rappelling company surely must have a facility with a trained professional staff and many safety procedures.
What they have is: a guy.
One guy. He’s standing casually right on the edge of the cliff, his back to the crater, his heels practically hangin
g over the ledge. Because of the angle, it looks to me as though he’s thousands of feet above the floor of the valley behind him. I’m scared just looking at him, but he does not appear to be even a tiny bit concerned.
There is no rappelling facility. There is a metal ring bolted into the rock near the cliff edge and some harnesses scattered on the ground. The guy tells us to put the harnesses on, then gives us a briefing on how to rappel.
In the United States, where we have a ratio of 4.7 lawyers for every human, the briefing would have lasted at least an hour and we would have signed legal indemnity forms until our fingers bled, admitting that we were suicidal idiots for engaging in this insanely dangerous activity and legally indemnifying the rappelling company from every bad thing that could ever possibly happen to us, including lightning strikes, earthquakes, comets, werewolf attacks and of course loss of blood caused by signing the forms.
But here, on the Cliff of Death, there is no paperwork to sign. The briefing takes maybe three minutes. Basically, the guy tells us that we will be walking backward off the cliff. He says we have nothing to worry about because we’ll be attached to ropes.
“It’s safer than riding in a car,” he says. This is not a reassuring statement for people who live in Miami. For us, smearing our bodies with pig blood and playing water polo in a shark tank is also safer than riding in a car, but that’s not an argument for actually doing it.
After giving us the brief briefing, the rappelling guy asks who wants to go first. Our fearless group leader, Rabbi Edwin “Eddie” Goldberg, immediately volunteers. He walks backward off the cliff and, with a jaunty wave, falls to his death.
No, that’s what I expect to happen, but somehow Rabbi Eddie makes it to the bottom alive. He remains at the base of the cliff to untie the people who follow. A teenage boy goes next; I can see his legs and arms shaking with terror as he backs off the cliff. But he also makes it down OK. The rappelling guy asks for the next volunteer and I step forward—not because I am suddenly brave but because I know that if I wait any longer, I will back out of this and Sophie will think I’m a coward. Which, make no mistake, is what I am. I just don’t want Sophie thinking it.
