Breaking Through the Anxiety
How one New Yorker was surprised to find Israel...
quite relaxing
Volume IV, Issue 16 | April 21 - 27,
2005TRAVELSeth
J. Bookey/gay city news
Yad Vashem (top l.) is Israel’s
memorial of the Holocaust in Jerusalem; soldiers with guns remain an everyday,
everywhere sight throughout the country; but on Purim, the nation’s
festive face is in full
view.Breaking Through the
AnxietyHow one New Yorker was
surprised to find Israel... quite
relaxingBy SETH J.
BOOKEYWhen I first rediscovered
“the lost Israeli branch” of my great-great-uncle’s family in
1996, my desire to visit Israel—after years of wanting to but somehow
never getting around to
it—intensified.But then, what
happened next is what always happens... Then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered
the Palestinians more than anyone ever had before, including re-dividing
Jerusalem, and violence broke out anew. Stone throwing, protests, suicide
bombings. All the things that help us say, “It’s not a good time to
go to Israel.”As luck would have
it, the frequent flyer mileage that took me to Sri Lanka only worked on El Al
through Tel Aviv. What kind of Diaspora Jew goes through Tel Aviv twice and
doesn’t at least leave the airport for a
visit?I only had a week in Israel, and
with the help of the goisrael.com Web site, and cousins I only really met
through e-mail, I planned my itinerary. Or had it planned for me. Dinner with
Carmit one night. Lunch with Nurit and Yoni the next day. Dinner at
Hanoch’s Friday. Then, Shabbat afternoon meeting most everyone else at
Ofer’s after exploring Caesaria in the morning. And that was just the
first three days, and only some of my distant
relations.On Sunday, a United Bus Tour
took us to Masada and the Ein Gedi spa. The next day, to Jerusalem—morning
at the new museum at Yad Vashem followed by a quick tour of the Old City. And
then, two nights at the kibbutz hotel at Kfar Giladi, with Hanoch behind the
wheel as we drove through the Galilee and the Golan Heights. This is where Jesus
is said to have walked; I was happy to have a
car.My next move—taking a public
bus to Haifa—was
unthinkable.Unthinkable?Yes,
because it’s the public buses we’ve been taught to worry about. And
I was worried, as half the passengers on the buses were painfully young,
impossibly thin soldiers of both genders toting matching guns. Just try to find
a seat without the barrel of a gun winking at you. There are guns just about
everywhere, and people asking if I was carrying a
gun.Of course not, was my
answer.A visit to Masada provides a
historical reinforcement of the debates stirring in Israel today. This
impregnable fortress saw rebel Jews withstand the Romans for three years, until
Caesar’s men built a ramp and got in, only to find everyone dead. But
before that, the Jews not only survived the siege, but tossed water over the
walls to taunt the Romans, to let them know that they had water to spare, to
waste, in the harsh desert. Things are
not quite so desperate today, but Israel remains a fortress, walling itself in
since the tortured negotiations with the Palestinians and the stubborn Jewish
extremists, many of them in new settlements, are making a two-state solution
difficult. Among the people I met, the desire for a peaceful solution is strong,
and yet... one of my peaceful cousins had a concealed weapon with us for an
entire day, something I learned to my alarm only during a security
check.Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial
park, stands as a permanent reminder of why the Jews needed a state to begin
with; the new museum charts in painful detail how the Germans denationalized its
Jews, including Albert Einstein, before rounding everyone up and killing them.
And along the road to Jerusalem, or at a wildlife park, or along the roads in
the Golan, you will see the burned out tanks and abandoned pockmarked
fortifications left by the Syrians and Jordanians in 1967. The spot where Prime
Minister Yitzhak Rabin was shot has sprouted a memorial stone and flame. Even
the “Island of Peace” in the Jordan River memorializes the seven
girls who were gunned down by a crazed Jordanian. The girls’ names are
spelled out in flowers.Despite all of
this, it didn’t take very long for me to feel completely at ease in
Israel. I am still at a loss to know why. Perhaps it was because everyone I met
seemed perfectly at ease and I had arrived on the Purim holiday, one of the only
Jewish holidays to mandate utter giddiness. Israelis celebrate Purim by dressing
up in costumes and exchanging small gifts of food, usually candy. In Tel Aviv,
school groups perform on small stages while parents take their costumed children
to Dizengoff Street. Some women were even getting their breasts painted on the
street.When I traveled to Masada,
everyone on the tour bus, drenched in sweat from the visit, eagerly covered
themselves in Dead Sea mud.“In
Israel, no one is ashamed,” my cousin Yoni explained just before we ran
into his brother-in-law, the brother-in-law’s boyfriend, and their newly
adopted son. By my seventh day there, I
could understand how people can live in Israel. Somehow, despite the odds, the
threats, the many losses and the burden of extricating themselves from the
occupied territories on the West Bank and in Gaza, most Israelis have dedicated
themselves to enjoying life, and their country. Israelis travel within their own
nation, which is roughly the size of New Jersey, a great deal and everyone seems
to know the history of every place you might travel. Though small,
Israel’s geographic and environmental diversity is astounding—from
the deep valleys of the Galilee and the Golan, to the bustling, cosmopolitan
world of Tel Aviv and its rising skyscrapers, to the bleak wastelands near the
Dead Sea. Strangers are delighted to learn you are on your first visit to
Israel.Despite the terrorist threats,
Israel is quite safe and serious crime is not a worry. Israel has more
bookstores per capita, more PhDs per capita and more museums per capita than any
other country in the world. Israel offers as much to the secular bookworm as it
does for the extreme sport enthusiast or religious
pilgrim.Israel’s farms have made
the country self-sustaining, and some produce gets exported. Vegetarians and
other health-conscious eaters will appreciate the Israeli habit of salads at
every meal, even at breakfast. A common habit, especially in Arab restaurants,
is to offer diners a platter of a dozen vegetarian items, from pickles to hummus
to lemons in tomato sauce, or your choice of any of these sorts of small side
dishes, accompanied by pita bread. Often, this is a meal in and of
itselfThe New Israeli Shekel (NIS) runs
about 4.3 to the U.S. dollar these days, but, paying in major foreign currencies
is possible. Some cash registers are even set up to display prices in more than
one currency. ATMs are everywhere and credit card machines
abound.In informal marketplaces,
haggling does happen. By simply saying no to a 100-shekel bauble, I wound up
buying it for just 70 NIS.The Israeli
tourism site, goisrael.com, offers just about everything you might want for
planning your trip, from finding lodging to sketching out your
itinerary.
Posted: Thu - April 21, 2005 at 10:52 PM
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Published On: Jun 20, 2009 07:04 PM
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